Week #50 ('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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Detail. One of my most treasured aspects of any piece is being able to pick apart the tiny little details that an artist will put into a piece, stuff it full of references and callbacks, and making a single piece an image that tells multiple stories indirectly by referencing past events and artists. It’s a form of visual allusion to do things like this, and it takes an artist (in our case of hip-hop imagery) with a true understanding and love of the culture to be able to pull off. Both of these guys I have for you below, one you should be INTIMATELY familiar with by now on my Art Appreciation posts and the other being a relative newcomer here, knows what they are talking about whenever they take on an image like these, and the respect is clearly there. Take a look, and study well all of the things they are putting into their art, because, chances are, if it’s there, it means something.

Remember, use this post to follow and subscribe to these artists; they deserve as much recognition as the musicians they collaborate with.

Artist(s): Chris Murray

Substance Abuse, by Rigz & Futurewave

Finding a new artist to sink your teeth into is always such a satisfying feeling, and it’s been a while since I’ve found someone like Chris Murray to show you guys. This dude has pretty much everything I’m looking for: his usage of juicy and vibrant colors (relative vibrancy; I know the image above is pretty forlorn but its’ colors pop and make it feel alive), the sense of scene that is brought about by a complete image, callbacks to previous albums, and being totally badass in the way they presents the characters. In a lot of ways, the work that Chris does reminds me of different graphic novels I have read, especially more modern ones that take a more melodramatic and stylized approach to the medium. More than anything this album cover feels like the panel of a comic book, the beginning of a story that is about to be told to you once you start the album. It’s the details in this picture that get you: you can see some of the album covers that represent past releases for both Rigz and Futurewave (particularly Bite The Bullet, which you can see on the left-most poster and vinyl under the bench-ridden homies’ foot), the names scratched into the bench, the fleeting forms of the people walking by, the weirdly open-toed shoes this dude is wearing in the pouring rain, and the fact that this dude is literally headphone-jacked into *himself*, like a dope fiend ready to get high off of some new tunes. My favorite thing about this (besides the burning, ghostly purple eyes, that’s a close second) is the dude in the background that lines up perfectly to the dude stuck in the ground in that background picture, such a secondary idea that gives the piece more character. This guy has a LOT of work like this, working with tons of people in the culture already, but it’s only recently that I caught on to his alum covers with his work on Raz Fresco and Futurewave’s project Gorgeous Polo Sportsman. Besides the covers, he has a ton of one-off images for y’all to see, so go and check out his shit on Instagram, I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Chris' Instagram/Chris' Website

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Artist(s): Manuel “Cep” Concepcion

1995, by 38 Spesh

I have been racking my brain trying to remember where I’ve seen this cartoon style before, because I know it’s inspired by or an homage to some other artist out there, but it’s escaping me right now; I know I’ll remember it *after* I put this out and feel like an idiot so I’ll go ahead and write about it and accept the consequences. There are two things I want to talk about with this piece, with the first being the reverence for the almighty year 1995, in which a good chunk of the best hip-hop albums of all time were released: we’ve got many different album cover recreations here, from Onyx’s All We Got Iz Us to Mobb Deep’s The Infamous, with Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx serving as a centerpiece of an immaculate year for the culture. These albums are ones that Spesh drew from for beats that inspired his own craft, so it’s only fitting that Cep would take inspiration from the visual media on this piece. There are other smaller details that show love as well, like the Ol’ Dirty cover tucked in behind the 1995, the 5 mics imagery, and that portrait of the classic Method Man look, that M-E-T-H-O-D-MAN look. The other thing that I want to point out is that this album cover looks TOTALLY unique in comparison to everything else I’ve seen from Cep, who usually operates in high-color pieces that incorporates a few, but not many, disjointed elements; but this time he’s going at it in black & white, having many different characters and points of focus. Like everything from him, it just reinforces to me in my mind the genius behind the talent, not locked into one “type” or “lane”; a true expressive.

Cep's Instagram/Cep's Website

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