Poster Image

A man eats chicken wings while two blues musicians play the electric bass and guitar nearby

$20

Item#: 2003SYR03

Purchase Details

11x17-inches, printed on heavy weight (100-pound) Hammermill cover paper. We package each print with a piece of chipboard in a clear plastic sleeve.

You also receive…

An information page with photos of the artist and poet, and hand-written comments from each.

Medium- and large-format posters are available by custom order. Contact us for details.

Steamy Summer Night

poster information

Description

Steamy summer night—
ribs smokin', guitars wailin'
Blues Fest makes it right

I'm a fan of the blues, and I like going downtown for Blues Fest. I love the feeling of the city being very alive, and of people being together, enjoying music.

Syracuse is a great town for the blues, because the blues are about overcoming adversity. Syracusans tend to be that way—have a strong endurance. With the harsh weather and so forth, you need a lot of endurance.

I also play a little blues guitar, just for fun. It's sort of like haiku. You've got the blues scale. The lead part and the riffs are all within that framework—the scale—but there's so much variety in how they're played. The same thing in haiku: there's that structure, and in that structure, infinite variety is possible.

I wanted the composition to be a little choppy, to reflect how the scene is worded in the haiku. I don't have one absolute style, but I have been developing this method of combining cubism and realism with amplified colors. This, to me, seemed like the best approach.

The pallet I wanted to be a bit dark yet still warm and vibrant. I chose to place the figures and surrounding shapes in a way to give a warm, rising smoky feeling to the environment.

What I like is how it doesn't make logical sense, in that all the figures are facing forward, like on stage, stacked and growing out of one another. I put in a lot of work, but it was definitely worth the effort.