2023 Commissions Winners
Letypage
These are collages for the first album of the post punk band Muerte Mortal. His personal touch is based on black humour, irony and surrealism.
The album has a special treatment after production as I manually cut out all the eyes of the covers: I cut out 600 eyes by hand! This way, depending on how you put the inside sheet, you can make different covers.
The collages of the inner bag are composed in such a way that there are specific elements that match the eyes cut out of the cover.
I have also created collages for their concerts.
Paul Henderson
This is a selection of my commissioned record covers produced over the last few years. Images 1-3 were created custom for the artist/project after listening to the music and having some conversations about tone and theme. I’m generally hired based on my previous work and given a fair amount of leeway to respond creatively to the music. I try not be too literal or didactic with the work but make something unique and interesting to accompany the music rather than illustrate it. Images 4-6 were original collages created separately that musicians subsequently chose for their covers.
Portfolio runners up
Anthony Gerace
Commissioned as accompanying illustration for a four part story by author David Ignatius for his new book “The Tao of Deception”, serialised in the Washington Post in late June, 2023. The story focused on four lightly fictionalised spies: the Mao-era father of the Chinese secret service, You Quiangshen, the jaded American lifter Tom Crane, and the young and merciless Ma Wei. The mechanisms at work were fairly simple—the four main illustrations featured portraiture, shot by me, that had been distorted to the point of anonymity, to both highlight the covert nature of the storytelling, while also making clear the dehumanising effects of spy craft of agents. Meanwhile, the accompanying illustrations used various mechanical interventions from my broader practice to simultaneously highlight and obscure story elements.
Included in this submission are three of the four main illustrations, along with seven of the accompanying pieces—about spycraft, surveillance, rendition, escape, murder, and the contemporary landscape.
The Scissorhands
For the SZ Magazin, a weekly independent magazine of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany's largest national tabloid, i was asked to collage an essay and to design the cover, which i am submitting here.
In the essay the author questions very critically the role and meaning of the female smile. She complains on why it is so hard for women to laugh when and how they want, how often their smile is demanded and judged at the same time in public space.
I had as specifications that the cover should stand out clearly and the text is immediately recognizable in the image. I decided to show different cropped female portraits with the focus on their laughing mouths. I cut or tore the mouths out of various contemporary magazines, scanned them and arranged them on an opulent 17th century floral still life by Jacob van Walscapelle.
The result is a surreally cheerful cover that makes the text immediately recognizable and spans the history of the female smile from then to the present day.
