For a long time now, I have been following the musical career of my good friend Tim Thwaites. In particular, his Nottingham-based band Radium 88 has claimed me as a fan.
I've known Tim for decades, and in time spent together we have often shared work in progress, whether that be art works of various sorts, or new music in development.
Over the years, Tim has chosen some of my art works to feature on Radium 88 CD covers, and I have been very proud to have collaborated in this way. I've been looking back on this collaboration and here are images that have been used, going right back to cassette covers from the mid-90's.
'Everything Looks Normal Now' was a scanned image, with colour bars added. I can't claim to have ever been at the cutting edge of technology, (in fact, the gap seems to be ever widening, nowadays,) but having a scanner and a version of Corel Draw was new to me at the time.
The design for 'life imitates television' cassette cover was a physical collage from magazine images, then scanned. I think it was quite a small-scale art work, but seemed to work well.
The neurovision ep cover (2000) featured one of my smaller pastel abstracts, with a little colour enhancement in the digital processing.
The genre melt ep, also from 2000, features another of the small pastel abstracts.
The image on the Worlds Collide ep cover is a photographic detail of a mixed-media collage piece I made, using old computer components. It was painted then photographed and digitally edited.
The same approach was used for 2004's Metamorphosis.
Around this time, (2005), I was making some 3d relief pieces, using wire mesh and papier-mache. These were sprayed with gold paint to give a faux-metallic finish, then calligraphic marks added, reminiscent of ancient text. 'nostalgia for a time that never was' shows a close-up of one of these pieces. They were like fragments of large-scale documents.
By 2007, I was becoming more interested in photography, and using digital manipulation to make connections with my physical art work. Several examples of this were seen in the images used for the ironically-entitled, 'only Science can tell us the Truth'.
2012's 'escaping tomorrow' used purely photographic images. The front cover once again reveals my love of textures. The rusty lock was one of several I photographed on some ageing portacabins.
In the summer of 2017, Tim asked me to do some publicity shots of the band. He was keen to have a mysterious, film noir look to the shoot, so we did it in the style of Shadow Laughter, the collaborative project I worked on for three years with Hamish Marr. (Previously, Tim had guested in one of our shoots, so he knew exactly the feel he wanted.)
Who knows, maybe a future Radium 88 cover will be born out of this?
Radium 88
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