Arty party Master of his craft: A brief guide to the art of Parquet Courts’ Andrew Savage
As his artwork becomes increasingly prominent - popping up on wall murals and vending machines - DIY looks at Savage’s arty side.
Source: Top photo.
He doesn’t just pen frustrated, suburban punk anthems - Parquet Courts frontman Andrew Savage is also a dab hand at design. With new album ‘Human Performance’, his role in the visuals is becoming a great deal more prominent, so we deemed it a good time to look through his work so far.
The band’s follow-up to 2014 album ‘Sunbathing Animal’ was announced by Savage himself. Bit-by-bit, he began plotting the cover art to form a wall mural in Brooklyn. Each day that passed, the mural displayed more letters, all of which would eventually spell out ‘Human Performance’ and “Parquet Courts”.
The actual cover is a painting within a painting. The gripping ‘Seizure in a Hallway’, from 2015, is at the centre, surrounded by the LP title in fragmented form. It takes a similar style to the bright bleakness of last year’s ‘Monastic Living’ tour sleeve, again designed by Savage. In fact, he’s been behind the brush for each of their records - even the Parkay Quarts pseudonym.
Savage met bandmate Austin Brown while both attended the University of North Texas. Brown was a major in philosophy, while Savage studied painting. Seven years passed before they formed a band, but even before this, Savage was matching music with art while working on Fergus & Geronimo, the Hardly Art-signed band who existed before Parquet Courts. Early sleeves mirror the kind that are more prominent today, containing stories about simple urban existence - the kind he’s fascinated in as a songwriter.
The art isn’t just popping up on murals. This week, Parquet Courts decided to stock their own newspaper in a local vending machine. 50 cents gave fans a full lyric sheet for the record (backed by the message “listen to it at night!”, plus an exclusive poster. True to the band’s original ethos, they hark back to a desire for physical existence, hitting rewind on today’s instant gratification and ‘Content Nausea’. Vinyl, vending machines, cassettes and an endless supply of gigs - those are the motifs Savage and co. live by.
Last summer, Savage hosted his very first exhibition: Color Studies 2015. “I like images that are familiar and ordinary, but hinged on an unsettling emotion,” he said in a statement. “I called the show Color Studies because I wanted to focus on colors that don’t appear in my palette often; you’ll find a lot of salmon pink and pastel colors — basically stuff I’ve been afraid to use because I wasn’t quite sure how.”
Take a look at some of his most recent work below.
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