Outward, in search, we extend
Watercolor
Stephanie Witchger
You’ll recognize the lightening strike, rootlike, mycelial networks here from the cover art of Buena Vista. I found in local artist Stephanie Witchger a kindred mycophile, a fellow in fascination likewise in love with mushrooms and all their miraculous, subterranean undertakings. She was delighted to be commissioned to paint the beautiful watercolor work “Outward, in search, we extend.” I couldn’t be happier with the results.
She evokes all of the dark and dank vitality of an underworld, and the ways sources of life are searched for by countless appendages deep in the humus of death, all that I had dreamed of and then some. I especially love the aqueous golds, greens, and reds here. Stephanie lives in Raleigh and works in Durham. Please go see more of her work here:
Hearing - Watercolor, pen and ink, Javier Enrique Almendarez Bautista
Fixating - Watercolor, pen and ink, Javier Enrique Almendarez Bautista
Morgan Riker is responsible for the layout of all of the lyric pages, the position and arrangement of every visual element in the album artwork, all graphic elements. She worked so hard, and I was almost reticent to ask for anything else, but I wanted another visual element for the lyric page of LEAPING. She was game, and I prompted her with the word “womb.” She came back to me with an amazing piece that features on the lyric page for LEAPING and is emblazoned on the disc itself, “Me, Don, You.”
Morgan worked from ultrasound images and nested three fetuses together, swirling, kicking, saying “Hello. What’s it like in your body?” As the title suggests, the viewer is invited into the question, into the ever-evolving attempt to face one another directly. Morgan is a working local artist in Durham producing beautiful ceramics, jaunty wire-frame air-plant holders, and screenprints of animals sprouting plants from their bodies.
See (and buy) her work here:
Me, Don, You
Digital Illustration
Morgan Riker
You’ll likely recognize Danny Arnold’s piece, entitled simply “Triptych,” from the album cover of Buena Vista and as the home button for this website, at the top of this and every page. I think I chose it as the home button because there’s something about Danny’s piece that feels like it ties all of the visual elements together, even as it is a tying together of three locations: Danny’s Home from when, in elementary school, he lived in North Olmsted, Ohio (represented in the right third of the piece); the titular Buena Vista Middle School in Nashville, TN (represented in the middle third of the piece); and my own childhood home on Modena Drive situated in the Maplecrest Neighborhood in Nashville (represented in the left third of the piece). Danny’s painstaking piecework of puzzling together tiny boxes to recreate the topographical textures of these three places, bound together by memory, imagination, time, mycelial networks, and the shared feeling Danny experienced in reaction specifically to the song CALLING, evokes so much of the feelings and dimensions of that song and of the album as a whole. The white boxes show connection points between these enjambed locations, places where they overlap and resonate, connecting across space and time. Themes of fragmentation, claustrophobia, consternating ambiguity, are somehow all summed up to a whole that is greater than its parts. It enacts, as it catches light and throws shadow, a hallowing of place and the moments rooted therein, remembered and witnessed, if ultimately irrevocable.
The best I can say about Danny’s piece: it pleases and helps me. Hopefully it does the same for you.
Danny lives and works in Manhattan, and you can find more of his work here: Danny Arnold