I discovered Nirvana on classic rock radio during my early morning drives to work after Hurricane Katrina and the flooding from the breached levees decimated New Orleans in 2005. I’d completely missed the grunge wave in the 90s. Back then, I spent long days in a medical practice working with sick patients, stubborn insurance companies, and overworked hospital clinicians. In addition, I was dealing with infertility treatments that ended in disappointment after disappointment for a lot of the decade. I put more stress on myself by sneaking outside to smoke, an old habit I picked back up thinking it would calm me. Overwhelm was a dark cloud overhead as I struggled to cope.
Popular culture, including the hottest music of the time, wasn’t on my radar.…
Author’s Note: I spent much of my formative art-making years dabbling and being inquisitive about many art-making techniques including sculpture, architecture, furniture design, painting, and collage. I found that even though collage has become the art medium I am most comfortable utilizing on a daily basis, it is the ability to freely move from one interest to another that pushes me. In 2010, I took a mixed media art class at the local community college. This is where I began working more extensively in the medium of collage, utilizing both existing images and forming my own imagery with paper.
Sometimes these pieces will host only a few clippings from magazines to tell the story in my mind, other times it will take many clippings weaved together for the piece to take shape.…
Perhaps no one has phrased this better than Michael Burkett, also known as “Fat Mike,” the lead singer of NOFX and co-founder of the San Francisco-based indie label Fat Wreck Chords. “I signed a fucking band; I didn’t sign an artist!” Fat Mike is quoted as saying in the last chapter of Dan Ozzi’s book Sellout: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy that Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore (1994-2007).
“If I’m gonna give you hundreds of thousands of dollars, help me sell the fucking records!” The punk singer and businessman is describing his frustration with Against Me! (the Florida band known for songs like Sink, Florida, Sink and Baby, I’m an Anarchist!) and their choice of album artwork for Former Clarity, featuring a black and white photograph of a single palm tree, which according to Fat Mike, was not a cover that would sell records.…
Jay Daugherty – “The Cannibal’s Cantabile”Jay Daugherty – “The Difference Between an Opera and a Frying Pan”Jay Daugherty – “The Number 5 Never Occurs in the Mineral Kingdom”
Author’s Note: These acrylic paintings from Jerusalem Florists series deal with the merging positive and negative colours, as well as everyday life with classic art. I started by using for inspiration frames of colour negative films taken in downtown Jerusalem (instead of painting in the open air, which was very tenable considering our extremely hot climate and the sun that in summer kills any distinguishable colour). By adding to these nearly documentary scenes free quotations from the old masters’ still lives, I tried to create complex visions to trace the link between the real and the surreal, between colourless and colourful, between present-day and old, between cultivated and wild, and between daydream and nightmare.…
