Al Larsen: CRITTERS ENCORE | Friday, August 7th
This Friday, August 7, Bantam Tools Machine Arts Gallery presents CRITTERS ENCORE, an exhibition of new work by artist, musician, and educator Al Larsen.
Larsen directs the Creative Media BFA program at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, and has a long musical history as a founding member of the influential indie rock band Some Velvet Sidewalk. The exhibition coincides with the release of a new Some Velvet Sidewalk record, which Larsen is currently supporting on tour.
Music | Some Velvet Sidewalk
His creative practice moves between drawing, music, performance, printmaking, and graphic design. The pieces in CRITTERS ENCORE begin as distracted notebook sketches: doodles, song lyrics, observations, and scribbles made without the expectation that they will become finished works.
Selected drawings are photographed and converted into vector files, smoothing and simplifying Larsen’s original marks into something he describes as “my hand, but not quite my hand.” A Bantam Tools Art Machine then draws this mechanical interpretation back onto paper. Larsen completes each piece by hand, adding ink and color with brushes.
The resulting works move between spontaneous drawings, algorithmically altered reproductions, expressive paintings, and carefully colored-in creatures. Many of the images also incorporate hand-drawn lyrics from Larsen’s new album, weaving words directly into the visual compositions and connecting the exhibition to his music.
CRITTERS ENCORE opens Friday, August 7, from 6 to 8 PM at Bantam Tools Machine Arts Gallery, 107 S. Division Street in Peekskill. Free slushies will be served.
The work will be available to view and purchase at Bantam Tools Machine Arts Gallery in Peekskill and online at bantamtools.com/gallery beginning at the opening.
Artist Statement
In general, my work unfolds as translations across media. Lyrics are set to music, become songs. Songs beget performances, recordings. Recordings lead to videos, record sleeves.
Performances demand posters, handbills. Printmaking has been a constant: letterpress, linocut, silkscreen. Drawing is in there somewhere, everywhere, in different ways at different stages.
I tend to fall in love with the rawest, most spontaneous manifestation of an idea. The thumbnail sketch that becomes an ideal, a template to be reproduced at different scales across time, processes, and media. Whether it’s a print, a performance, or a recording, I’m always looking for the same sensation, a feeling that the work has just arrived, without forethought or expertise.
The pieces in this series start as distracted sketches. Junk I draw in my notebook when I’m not trying. Maybe it’s nighttime and I’m just processing the day. A mix of doodles, song lyrics, observational drawing, and scribbles.
I try not to care that the drawing turns into anything. But when a page has some good energy, I might take a picture and convert it into a vector file.
In graphics, a vector file is a way of representing an image as points and lines or arcs between points. The way I do it, the drawing gets dumbed down a little, smoothed out, algorithmically stylized. It doesn’t make the image better, but it does make it alien. My hand, but not quite my hand.
To make the pieces in this series, I draw the file with a Bantam Tools Art Machine.
It’s a simple mechanical device that holds a regular pen and draws a vector file perfectly. The robot draws the alien vector version of my distracted notebook drawing, returning it to paper.
The next step is to ink the images. I use brushes and mix colors as I go, putting my hand and eye back into the image. Now the pressure is on to make it “come out,” but I try not to think about it too much. Sometimes I feel like I’m a kid coloring carefully in a coloring book. Sometimes I’m just making marks on the paper.