(Click on the image to enlarge)
"Folk Art Guitar" (Side B) © Flavio Martín Morante_2012
Handmade type, scanned, traced and worked into Adobe Illustrator.
"Folk Art Guitar" (Side A) © Flavio Martín Morante_2012
Handmade type, scanned, traced and worked into Adobe Illustrator.
The designs seen above are the ones I presented to the open call by the Village of Grafton, for artists to come up with designs for the metal guitar banners planned to decorate the Paramount Plaza in Grafton, Wisconsin. Today I was officially notified that I have been selected as one of the 8 artists that will be displayed permanently on the Plaza, which it fills me with a lot of pride and joy for various reasons. Despite that the monetary award it is well received, it is the fact itself. As a "frustrated musician" (the farthest I got is to try to play the harmonica only to make the dogs cry) but with a deep love for music, have the honor of having a piece of my artwork that celebrates the influence of american music in a plaza it is... really motivating (for lack of a better word).
About Paramount Records and Grafton.
I have to admit that the legacy of Paramount Records and the connection to Grafton it has been a recent discovery for myself (after I moved here 8 years ago). It will make this post too long to write you the whole story here, but if you are really interested on it, visit Paramount´s website (click HERE) or the article about it on Wikipedia (click HERE). It is a really good tale if you are into music history.
About the design.
The "Folk Art Guitar" design was conceived to represent the relationship between the afro-american community and the production of the so-called "race records" at Paramount Records in Grafton, Wisconsin during the first decades of the past century.
By using handmade lettering, an element frequently found in Southern Folk Art (as I was able to see when living in Alabama), I wanted to link the musicians that in the majority of the cases - that made it into the recording studios at Paramount- were originally from the southern region of the United States and the long tradition of song writing and self-thaught music skills found in North American culture.
I chose the words for this design after conducting some research on the facts regarding this musical and business collaboration, which harvested so many musical fruits (as the famous 12000s Series catalogue). Sadly, for a matter of space, I could not add the whole list of musicians that passed through Grafton and whose music became part of the "Paramount Catalogue", but I still added some of the names that left a deep mark not only in Grafton but also on the American music history as well, as it was Charlie Patton, Blind Lemon, Alberta Hunter, etc.
I will be posting more about it (photos or video) soon, as I started to work on the painting of the guitar.
No comments:
Post a Comment