Art & Asphalt
More sealed cracks, the close of Art Drop #15, and insight from John Greenwood.
UPCOMING WORKSHOP
Diana will be leading a workshop at OLANA on Saturday, August 17th 2024 from 10am-12pm and you are welcome to join if you are within striking distance of the Hudson Valley. From the perspective of an artist, writer and gardener, she will be exploring mindfulness, the act of noticing and connecting with nature during a guided walk at the historic farm at OLANA, home of Frederic and Isabel Church. Details and registration information are at https://www.olana.org/programs-events/.
Our recent move to our not-quite-totally-finished house in Massachusetts is still keeping us very preoccupied – unpacking, cleaning, troubleshooting decisions with our builder, looking for those spoons we ordered. The one bright spot is that the Olympics are an amazing educational tool for a 6-year-old on summer break with busy parents. Winning, losing, mistakes, falling, hurting, and sports you never knew existed. There’s something very special about showing the pole vault to a kid who has never seen it before.
ART DROP #15 CLOSES TONIGHT
There are only a few more hours left to collect a print of Walking before it enters our self-imposed embargo until August 2025.
Art Drop #15 will close later today at midnight EST on August 7th. To learn more about the paper, sizes, and pricing click the button below to visit the art drop page on our website.
Below are two more photographs from this series where I look for interesting compositions/shapes/objects in the sealed cracks of road surfaces and parking lots.
It’s surprising how much variation I’ve noticed in the road surfaces themselves, and how the light can impact the scene. On tree-lined roads, overcast days are best as I don’t want any shadows falling on these compositions. On occasions when there is full sun such as Eye & Nose above, the intensity of the black in the sealant can really change depending on your relationship to the light, but the challenge then of course is avoiding my own shadow.
I once found myself in a supermarket parking lot after a rainstorm and the colors really caught my eye – there was a blue hue from the wet asphalt and how the evening light was catching it which disappeared when I turned around. For this reason I decided to preserve the color in these photographs, rather than convert them all to black and white – which was tempting for consistency and simplicity, but I think the subtle range in colors are worth keeping.
While working on this art drop, writing our previous post, and reminiscing about that mid-90s period of watching Glastonbury and discovering Orbital (Paul & Phil Hartnoll), I decided to reach out to the artist John Greenwood who created the artwork for their Snivilisation album. After graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1990, John was part of the famous Young British Artists group show put on by Charles Saatchi in 1992 alongside the likes of Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin among others. John was kind enough to answer a few questions about that era and how the work came about:
Tom: What can you tell us about creating the album art for Snivilisation?
John: Paul Hartnoll is my contact, he had moved up to London from Sevenoaks and was staying in our living room, my first flat with my then-girlfriend in about 1992, and I had some paintings stacked for collection in the front room when he was living there. I think he found them interesting, and so a couple of years later when they wanted some art done he suggested that I be the artist. At the time I was building a show for a gallery just off Regent Street called Benjamin Rhodes. They were pencil drawings (a lot quicker than doing paintings), and I said to Paul that yes I could do the work but I don’t have a lot of time because I’m building this show, but I could do you a drawing, and he was perfectly alright with that. So that’s why it’s just grey and white – it’s just black and white content on grey card.
My studio at the time was in Stoke Newington. When I finished college in 1990 I helped to build a studio with some other artists and we lived there for about nine years. When we moved there Stoke Newington seemed to be on the edge of habitable London and by the time we left it was highly fashionable, and basically the artists were pushed out. We moved from there to Hackney.
It was quite interesting to look at the image for Snivilisation again, I haven’t looked at it for years. I must confess I was actually quite pleased with it. The little cars dotting around it was just a joke take on the idea that Orbital’s name was a reference to the construction of the M25 which I remember going on in the early 80s and Paul was aware of from being in Sevenoaks, and it relates to the way that people were choosing venues – fields for dance parties tended to be close to the M25. And then linking that, in a way, to the figure which has very little inside it – the only thing that’s making it up is the music, and at the time Walkmans were kind of modern, so really the idea was that the figure becomes filled with the sensations of the music and that there isn’t a person really without the senses that are flowing through them.
Tom: Did the use of your artwork on Snivilisation open many doors for you at the time?
John: Not really. The thing that’s been rather nice is I think I’ve now done four album covers over the thirty years for Paul, so that’s the door that opened. There isn’t really a relationship between the art world and I guess you’d call it the illustrative world – they tend to avoid each other, or certainly the art world tries to avoid the illustrative world. Orbital have such a loyal following that I’ve sold occasional prints to people who are Orbital fans who aren’t really art people – but somebody last year bought a full size painting purely on the grounds that they found my Instagram account and contacted me through that, and that was nice. But on the whole it hasn’t helped my career really.
Tom: Without the internet, how did exposure turn into opportunity for a young artist in 1994?
John: Then, as now, it’s very hard for young artists, there’s far more artists that want to climb onto the pedestal than there is space for them. It’s hard now – I can’t get representation in London, but I’m reasonably happy because I’ve got a gallery out in Los Angeles which seems to be interested in showing everything I can do in shows every couple of years.
Tom: What are you working on these days?
John: I’m working on a show, my third show for the Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, which is probably about a year away, so lots of drawings.
Thanks again to John for taking the time to answer my questions. You can see more of his work on his website at johngreenwoodartist.com.
I think I had long forgotten that Orbital’s name was derived from the M25 (a famous highway in England that surrounds London), so my road maintenance artwork that was born out of this stew of memories and influences feels quite apt here.
Thanks for reading! Have you started noticing any crack sealing on the roads where you live by any chance? You’ll be hearing from us again this month before our next art drop goes out on September 1.
Support
If you enjoy what we do here, it would mean a lot if you can support our newsletter in some way. Consider becoming a paid subscriber or perhaps make a one-off tip via Buy Me A Coffee, or better yet, add some art to your space with a print from our permanent collection or an art drop. Even just recommending our newsletter to others, or liking this post, commenting, forwarding it on – it all helps and we appreciate it. Thank you for supporting our work as independent artists!
You like things i like. Enjoying your website. I just subscribed. I love pavement, grey is my favorite color, asphalt, lol. Seriously.
Interesting to read about those Orbital covers and the unexpected M25 connection with your tarmac ribbons of course! Greenwood’s colour image there is a cracker.