Come detto Brad ha risposto a 10 domande che abbiamo raccolto nel forum. Brad fa parte da tanti anni dello staff del 10C, prima cone grafico occupandosi del layout di alcuni album e xmas singles.
Da pochi anni ha cominciato anche a disegnare alcuni posters per i PJ e poi ha fatto anche poster per QOTSA, Flight to Mars, Egles of death Metal, Steve Turner, Melvins, Monster Magnet..
1) Hi Brad,
among the many beautiful posters you realized for the PJ tours, I was struck the most by the Toronto 2006 one, with all those references to the song “Severed Hand”. We challenged with each other in a friendly competition to spot as many as we could.
Will you make other similar posters with references to songs or was this just an isolated case ?
Ciao
Franco
Thanks for the kind words Franco! I like the Toronto poster a lot too, that one was fun to draw. Will I ever do any other posters based off song lyrics…sure. I have been recently trying to figure out which songs to use for possible future posters, so yeah, it’s very possible I will be doing another poster or two based off song lyrics. When I heard Severed Hand I knew I wanted to make a poster based off that song. There is a lot of imagery in the words to pull from being that it’s a song about psychotropic drugs, so I knew right away I wanted to try and illustrate some aspect of that song. The poster is supposed to be about the anticipation, waiting for things to kick in…the perspective of the room starts to change. Structures of reality are no longer reliable or rational, time to “explore and not explode”…
2) Hi Brad,
We know that many of your works are sold at considerable sums in on-line auction sales. Do you feel a privileged man seeing your posters sold at similar sums or do you feel foolish not to exploit further the economic potential of your works?
Ndruglio
That’s a good question Ndruglio. It is very rewarding to know that people like what you are doing, so much so that they are willing to spend almost 5 times the original cost of a poster. It’s a privileged feeling as well as a very frustrating feeling of being used. Some people buy posters/prints solely to instantly resell them for profit. They don’t care about the art or the image or the band or the show, it might as well be a blank piece of paper to them, so long as they know they can resell it for profit. The poster is basically a voucher for money. They have no understanding of the process that was taken to create that poster/print, how much energy and time and thought went into creating it. They don’t know, and they don’t care. All they care about is money. How they can make more money as easily as possible with the smallest amount of effort on their part. And it gets real old, real quick watching these people who don’t have an inkling of originality or creativity in their entire person, walk away thinking they are clever or crafty for being able to make a quick buck. I would actually prefer that my work didn’t sell for anything more then I sold it for, because I cannot stand putting money in the pockets of people that absolutely don’t deserve it. They are leeches. Leeches that blow smoke up your ass while they suck your blood.
Do I feel foolish for not exploiting the further economic potential of my work…no. Not at all. I didn’t get into this field to make money. If I wanted to make money I would have been a banker or stock broker or businessman. I love art. I love design. Having been able to even get the job I have has been quite an amazing experience. The fact that I get to sit down and draw and people want to buy what I draw was something I didn’t even expect to happen once I got this job. So being able to make any money at all off of making posters has been a surprising bonus, which allows me to continue drawing and making more posters. All I want to do is make art, if I can make a little money off that, enough to get by so I can continue making more art, then that’s more then I was ever expecting.
3) Hi Brad,
how much does the band influence the choice of your subjects? And who of the five members plays the most active role?
Thanks
Iacopo
For posters Iacopo, the band has no influence as far as literally telling me what they’d like to see on their posters. They give myself and the Ames Bros. complete creative freedom. But they do influence the subject matter of the posters through their music and politics and philosophies, and based off of those you can start to anticipate what you hope will work well for the band…but they never sit us down and say this is what we’d like to see on the posters. It’s all left up to us.
4)Hi Brad,
do you already know if you draw the poster for the PJ Italian show next June? If you will, as representatives of the Italian Jammers community, could we help somehow suggesting ideas for the subject ?
Ciao
Franco
Hi Franco, unfortunately for the upcoming European tour there will only be posters for the shows that aren’t festivals. So we didn’t get to do any for Italy.
5) In the Honolulu poster there is a reference to the U2 album (How…) in the missile upon the “J”. In the missile’ s trail something else is also drawn but I have never understood if it is a reference to PJ or U2 and also what it is exactly.
Actually there is no reference to the U2 album in the Honolulu poster. The thing in the “J” is a bird. It’s not a real bird mind you, but just happened that there was a space between the “L” and the “J” that looked like a birds beak and head. So I put one in there. Plus I figured it would help in the composition to differentiate between the word “PEARL” and “JAM”. No missile. Just a fictitious bird’s head.
6) Hi Brad,
first of all I would like to pay my compliments to you.
I would like to ask you how you realize your works in practice.
Do you make your drawings first by hand and then elaborate them on the pc?
Do you work all by yourself or with a team?
Yeah, I draw them by hand first. Sometimes I ink the drawings and sometimes I just use the dirty pencil drawing. Either way I scan the drawing or inked version into the computer and clean it up and color it in photoshop and make any necessary adjustments I didn’t see when I was drawing it. I work all by myself, yes. However I do have a very insightful, wonderfully creative and intelligent girlfriend who is far more talented then I could ever wish to be, who is not only tremendously inspiring, but also an unbelievably helpful resource to bounce ideas and concepts off.
7) Hi Brad,
How did you feel when you were not allowed to sell the 2005 South America poster?
From an artistic point of view, does the posters production make you feel fulfilled or you would prefer devoting yourself also to other artistic representations?
When I was told the South America posters would not be sold at the shows, I was pretty crushed. When I found out I could do a poster for that tour, I wanted to utilize that opportunity to say something, I didn’t just want to make a visually interesting poster. I was having a hard time coming up with a concept, so I talked to my good friend Jason, who at the time was teaching in Sao Paulo Brazil and asked him for some insight on what it’s like living in South America. He told me how there is a great deal of resentment there towards US companies coming in and plundering the natural resources of South America. He told me about a book he read by Eduardo Galeano called “Open Veins of Latin America” which deals specifically with how the people of resourcefully rich regions are kept poor while financially bloated US companies make fortunes. The title alone was enough to help me figure out what I wanted to do for the poster. Living in America, there is a thick veil built into the foundation of our society blinding the citizens from the exploitive practices of our government and corporations in other countries which provide us with a decadent, over abundant, comfortable, “free” lifestyle. When a large portion of Americans look at nations not as developed as ours they scoff and think those nations need to assimilate more towards our style of life, when the reality is that our style of life is built on a necessity for certain nations to remain under-developed and poor so we can continually exploit their man power and resources for our own benefit, suck the blood right out of their veins while they do all the hard work. I really wanted the people of South America who went to those shows to get those posters, it was designed for them. It was my way of expressing sympathy and guilt for the practices of my own country, and realizing that it’s fucked and needs drastic change. But my politics are bit more extreme then the band’s, and I was pretty let down and deflated when I found out that the posters weren’t going to be sold. I understood why the decesion was made, I was just really excited for the people to get this poster, see what their reaction would be. So it took a lot of the wind out of my sails to find out they weren’t going to get them.
Per the second part of your question, yes making posters is tremendously fulfilling. In the 8 or so years I have been working in the professional graphic design field, making posters is the only time I feel like I am making actual art. As a graphic designer you always have a client to answer to. Graphic designers are the prostitutes of the art world…someone tells us what they want and we tell them how much it will cost to do that, and even though they are hiring you for your trained skills, they get to dictate what you should do. It’s very disheartening, you make art and then the client tells you to change it. With posters, no one tells me to change anything, I get the final say. So in that sense it’s the most fulfilling thing I get to do as a graphic designer. However, even with rock posters, you are still working with another entity and their ideologies/image. So you have to filter your ideas through what would work best for a particular band. And while I will always have a desire to make rock posters, you still have someone else to answer to. So as time goes on, there is a desire to be even more fulfilled by creating art in which you only answer to yourself and your own ideologies. Working in graphic design can real kill your artistic tendencies…you are just making crap look cool so people will buy it. It’s not art.
8)Hi Brad,
How much does politcs influence the posters you create for PJ ? Are your works independent of the band’ s political ideas or rather influenced by them ?
For example, why did you choose the avocado for the last PJ album’ s sleeve?
The fact that the fruit is on the sleeve and the hazel is inside, is it perhaps a reference to the harshness of the subjects treated by the band in its songs ?
Politics have a huge influence on the posters I create for Pearl Jam. Luckily, Pearl Jam has always been a politically minded band, so there is the chance to incorporate politics into the posters, just as the band incorporates it into their music. However, they aren’t Rage Against the Machine, so you don’t want to make every poster a politically themed poster. They are a rock band and like to have fun, as do people attending their shows. So I try and keep the politics to a minimum as best I can, and balance it out with posters that are just visually interesting and fun. The band and I share pretty similar political beliefs, as I said above, however I tend to be a bit more on the extreme side, so my political beliefs influence my art a great deal,...I just have to whittle them down a bit to get them to work for Pearl Jam’s political beliefs who have a much larger audience they are responsible for. For example the NEOCON series for the 2004 Vote For Change tour…on the Grand Rapids poster with Bush on it, originally there was a blood splatter that accidentally ended up right on Bush’s forehead. Through moving layers around it got hidden and I didn’t know it was there. I found it when I was separating the layers for print and brought it to the front of the layers and I loved it. I showed it to Jeff and he loved it and said I should leave it in. When it came time to send it to print I wasn’t so sure…Jeff liked it but what would the rest of the band think? They hadn’t seen it. A blood splatter on Bush’s head inside the letter “O” which looks surprisingly like a target or gunsight during an election year makes quite a bold statement. This was even before the South America poster and the problem with the knife…I knew the r est of the band would have issues with it, that it would be too extreme a statement and go against what they were trying to achieve that tour and election year. So I removed it. Personally, I loved it, and if it was my own art print it would have stayed in, but when making these posters I have to think about how to best represent the band and their ideologies. Personally I think any government that notoriously uses violence over and over and over again for their own personal benefit and gain while masking it as necessary efforts for the greater good of peace and humanity, needs to be dealt with with the same violence they breed into the world. But the band can’t be that explicit, and I am pretty sure not all of them would even agree with me on that. So our political beliefs, while similar, are different.
As for the Avocado and whether it has any political connotations,...some things have more meaning then it first may seem, but that doesn’t mean it has anything to do with politics.
9) Hi Brad,
Do you already have some project in the Rock Art world or you are come back at your ”normal” job?
I am working on posters for some other bands here and there when I have time, and hope to work on more in the future. As I said above, the thing I am most eager to work on are art prints. Something that is not associated with any band or anyone else’s interests. Some things are already in the works for some upcoming art prints…
10) Hi Brad,
the cover you have done for the last xmas singles in amazing, are there some chance to use again the design for a poster?
Thanks! Glad you like it. Unfortunately I don’t think that image will ever be used for a poster. It was designed specifically for the movie Reign Over Me, and is a drawing of the character Adam Sandler plays in that movie. Plus due to all the color overlays in the face, it would be a total pain to try and seperate and screen print.
