Week #26 ('20) Art Appreciation
Welcome to my weekly Art Appreciation post, where I provide a list of some amazing album covers, single art, and random art that have come out within the past week. I’ll give you the artist/photographer/painter/magician’s name, as well as any social media or websites where you can go and check out more of their work. Click here to go back and see some other Art Appreciation posts.
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Pay special attention to the use of color on these three pieces; I love the vibrancy and use of contrasting colors on a lot of these covers, especially this first one you’ll see from HomelessCop. Color is one of the many elements in making a piece of art engaging and pleasant to look at, and while it is easy to slap some color on and make it pretty, having the colors work together to draw your eyes into specific areas and spaces is a talent that should be recognized.
Remember, use this post to follow and subscribe to these artists; they deserve as much recognition as the musicians they are attached to
Artist(s): Homeless Cop
Your Birthday’s Cancelled, by Iron Wigs
This album cover (and most of Homeless Cop’s other work that I’ve seen) shows a personally satisfying use of color that I’ve seen in very few cartoonists that also work in the hip-hop sphere. I would describe the work as chromatic, but something that sets him apart from others is his grounding use of the color white, framing and structuring the pieces in ways that rein in on unchecked color, making that color pop in ways that a Piet Mondrian painting would for instance. Obviously on the album cover here you get the white frame, but even within the characters here (which remind me of characters from Mad Max crossed with Bojack Horseman) you get the white that gives the guys here a bit of an everyday man feel to them. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the attitudes of the three emcees within Iron Wigs, with the aggression of Verbal Kent, the irreverence of Vic Spencer, and the languidness of Sonnyjim coming through in the oddity of the scene. These three showing up to your birthday is the kind of humor you find on the project as well. Go check out this dudes website and try and cop some of his work; you can find shit both cute and hard.
Homeless Cop's Instagram/Homeless Cop’s Twitter/Homeless Cop’s Website
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Artist(s): Manuel “Cep” Concepcion
Flour City Street Bible Chapter 2, by Black Geez & Eto
You’ll find that Cep will be a mainstay on my Art Appreciation posts here on Tha Soup Dude’s Kitchen. He is as talented as he is prolific, with his image fronting many an amazing project in underground hip-hop. This week he brings one of of favorite subjects of his to the table: a human skull. His stylized skulls found on such albums as the previous installment in the Flour City Street Bible series, Flee Lord and 38 Spesh’s Loyalty & Trust, and Elcamino & Oh Jay’s Where’s My Pyrex are sick as hell, all having that third eye and surrounded by recurring symbols. You have the snake, banded red, white and black, both black and red roses, and a use of the teeth to present some flashiness to the piece (I also like how a level-up has occurred, where the last Flour City Street had gold teeth you see there is now diamond teeth). It’s giving me this Day of the Dead vibe to it, with a more regal presentation of death. Following Cep would be a fantastic idea, because not only will you see some amazing art, but you’ll also be keeping up with the best music coming out right now since he’s attached to anything worth it’s salt.
Cep’s Instagram/Cep’s Twitter/Cep’s Website
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Artist(s): GodsSonRod & Ron_Flair
Rounds, by Calboy
I’m including this piece here because the way these dudes drew Calboy and the… dog? is just so cool to me. There was a webcomic that I used to read a long-ass time ago called Prequel, (which is still updating; who knew?) which is based in the video game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and the images here looks ripped straight from the panels of that webcomic. The exaggerated poses, the amazing faces on Cal plus the Dog, and the fire background with literal fire and moon-mountain-spire-thing have a cool Boondocks/Aqua Teen Hunger Force vibe. I also love the jarring transition between a graveyard (with what I’m assuming are headstones to his lost homies, RIP) and the beautiful backing landscape; with the wall of fire it’s like Calboy occupies a sort of hell or underworld. I’ve got to give special props to that dog though, which I honestly thought was some sort of anthropomorphic Gucci handbag on first glance, something I chose to not unsee because the thought of Calboy taking his Gucci bag out for a walk about a cemetery is just hilarious.
GodsSonRod’s Instagram/Ron_Flair’s Instagram/GodsSonRod’s Twitter/Ron_Flair’s Twitter
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