Music….

I was asked by some good friends if I would contribute some artwork towards their musical endeavours. They’re all quite talented people, and very passionate about what they do, so it was a pleasure to be involved.
The first of my collaborations with musicians came in the form of designing a mask which was to be painted onto the face of the protagonist of the music video for the Grand Rapids song Singing Showers Golden Lights. The idea was for the face painting to resemble a voodoo mask, designed to appear ethereal without being overly scary, as that would clash with the romantic nature of the lyrics.

This was the final design of the voodoo mask to be painted on, and below is a behind-the-scenes video of the process of applying it, shot by the director Adam Bryce and Ben King, singer and songwriter behind the Grand Rapids.

The following are stills from the music video, which was filmed in monochrome to emphasise the graphic nature of the voodoo mask.

This is the video for the Grand Rapids’ song Singing Showers Golden Lights:

Anthonie Tonnon, the man and the voice behind Tono and the Finance Company, had an EP of songs coming out. The idea for the EP cover was for it to be an exquisite corpse; the game where one person draws something and folds the paper over with only a tiny fraction of the bottom of the drawing being visible. The paper is then passed onto the next person to add to it, who will fold their part of the drawing over as well so no part of the drawing done prior is visible to the person drawing the next segment. Usually the subject is a being of some kind, hence the ‘corpse’ in the title, and the game was a particular favourite with the Surrealists, because it unearthed all manner of polymorphous beings conjured up out of artists’ collective imaginations.

This is what the EP cover looks like, for Love and Economics, by Tono and the Finance Company:

My portion of this exquisite corpse was the crotch.

John Ward-Knox drew the head, Erin Forsyth was responsible for the torso, Timothy Chapman was responsible for the corpse’s right arm, Taarati Taiaroa for the left arm and Ceili Murphy drew the feet.

At around the same time, I was busy completing an album cover for my friend Nikolai Zhivago-Clark’s band, Dreams of the Dead. I had already completed an EP cover design and the time had come for them to publish a full-length album of material.

Dreams of the Dead EP, Princess’ Dream

Dreams of the Dead CD, The Nibelung Cycle

The idea behind the artwork, as well as trying to interpret the music in my own visual form, was that each drawing could be linked to another. The drawings that made up the cover booklet could be linked to the drawings inside as well as on the back cover.

All images Copyright 2020, Aleksandra Petrovic