Back in May my friend Garen asked me to work on a painting for his album (now likely an EP) that he’d complete before he moves to Michigan for UM’s engineering PhD program.  I’ve always known Garen as a driven and talented musician, so I was pretty happy to do something in collaboration.   We started off with a bunch of rough sketches and from those we whittled it down to this sketch:

Note: not the actual title – I didn’t know what the actual title was at that point.

Garen liked the sketch, but wanted the Octopus to be up on a stool almost as if he was a standing man, and it should be more of a profile view than this.  This version also seemed too wide for a CD jacket, so the new sketch would have to be more of a “box” format.  Early on Garen envisioned one arm “picking his butt” – but we both agreed that dipping a quil in his own ink would be more interesting.

Here is the drawing that Garen approved for the painting.

Now we had to have discussions about what would go in this Octopus’ room.  Where was he?  Garen decided he should be in a somewhat ambigous space.  A wood cabin kind of interior, very stark.  If there was a window it should look out upon the ocean, Garen was adamant that there should not be trees or a forest of any kind out there.  So, I got to work…

This is the “final” painting.

Since this is on raw wood it looks quite different in person than in a photograph.  After showing the final painting to Garen he admitted it wasn’t quite what he was looking for.  Previously his direction was that he wanted it to look like an “old portrait.”  I wasn’t really sure what that meant, but I soldiered on anyway.  It turns out he wanted something more abstract, like a Monet landscape.  To try and compromise we’ve been going back and forth on different photoshopped versions of this photo in which I try to make it look like it is on an old weathered piece of wood pulled from the sea.  For the last six weeks or so the entire project is on hold though as Garen was too busy recording the album, and also rehearsing with Ken and I was too busy finishing up with my summer term classes.  With Garen leaving in September we don’t have a lot of time to get this done – and at this point the project may be put in a permanent state of limbo.  I wanted to share this though as it was an interesting project to work on.

Not only did I get to work on the album art, but Garen asked Aaron and I to jam with him a few times in the past three months to work out the kinks in his songs.  I played bass for the first time in eleven (or twelve) years.