This month, Jeremy Reynolds from Portland dance troupe Hockey has a serious art attack.
Album artwork
“I’ve done all the artwork for our album as well as designed our posters and T-shirts. I just really enjoy art as a hobby and it’s exciting to inform the visual aesthetic as well as being a part of the music. Album artwork has always mattered to me a music fan: I admire bands that have a great aesthetic that works with the music. Our latest record, ‘Mind Chaos’ is four mini pictures or album covers in one, split into four panels. The idea was that it would go along with the theme of the record, which is that everyone sees things differently.”
Therapy?
“I find that I can store up a lot of creativity by not doing art for a while and then when I get the chance to finally do it, after we get off tour for example, I can really go nuts for a while. It’s definitely expressive of an emotional reality for me personally, so it gets way down in there and I guess that’s what attracts me to it: it’s therapeutic as you are working on a deeper aspect of your self or of your awareness. I’ve used all different kinds of medium: paint, crayons, coloured pencils, I’m always really erratic. A lot of it is accidental. I had a huge pile of paper in my room of all my work and I go through things. The more I can free up the process, the more I like the result and can lose touch with my intentions on whatever I’m trying to do. I let something else take over and inform it: it’s messy and very in the moment.”
Cartoon love
“I follow the really classical painters and artists of the past hundred years: Picasso, Moreau, Vasquez and Warhol, Gustav Klimt and things like that. I wish I knew more about modern art but I don’t. I just paint and throw things together in a really abstract way: I just try and funnel the creativity of the music into the art. But my favourite artist is Jean Dubeffet. He does these childlike cartoons which are simplistic but are also really powerful at the same time. There’s a mixture of elements so they are both sophisticated and childlike.”
Picasso the great
“I went to the Louvre in Paris and the Tate Modern in London after we had been on a plane for twenty hours, and I saw some amazing work. Guernica by Picasso is probably one of my favourite paintings. I like the expressive and three-dimensional emotional reality that comes with it. He uses space and expanse to represent something that is emotional. It’s emotive and extra-sensory in a way. And I think that’s what is so great about visual art, it’s at the edge of what our senses can understand, reminiscent of a greater unity and a more informed reality.”
The big question
“I think art is a gesture and it can be anything you like. You can take it to any level, but if it’s intended to be art then that’s what it is. It can be a urinal a la Marcel Duchamp. But if I had to make something out there then I would probably use cardboard and it would have loads of triangles in it all sitting together. I think artists are probably crazier than musicians, deep down. They seem to be genuinely mad and they don’t have any public performances as such, so they can just be really crazy individuals.”
