I was really excited to work on the artwork for the newest CD release from oboist Margaret Marco entitled Hidden Gems: Oboe Sonatas of the French Baroque. It’s a recording that fills a very specific niche in the recorded oboe repertoire, but it’s a great album and if you like baroque music, it’s a wonderful addition to any music collection.
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We’re in full Spring mode here in Kansas with thunderstorms, hail and tornadoes rolling in last night! No damage, fortunately, but I hope it’s not a sign of more to come. I spent most of last week in Connecticut which is a beautiful state and you can drive it top to bottom in a couple of hours. That’s a strange concept for those of us out in the Midwest!

With the arrival of Spring comes a new crop of concerts at KU and this is a poster I did for the upcoming KU Wind Ensemble performance on Monday, March 30th. It’s a great ensemble, so check it out if you love live music.

In a very loose connection to St. Patrick’s Day, I wanted to point out an interesting marketing effort by General Mills in which they are bringing back the old school cereal boxes of days past. The Kix box is something else!

Happy St. Patrick’s day everyone and have a wonderful time!

In the “culture of the remix” that we are currently experiencing, there are some pretty fascinating and creative things going on. The appropriating of other visual elements to create new work can be seen in streets all over the world. This technique was taken further into the public eye when, in 2008, street artist Shepard Fairey became world famous (infamous?) with his graphic of Barack Obama taken from an AP photograph.

In the popular musical world, there are “mashup” artists like Girl Talk who take all kinds of different music and mix it together (check out Feed the Animals). However, this is not a new technique as DJ Shadow pioneered this on his critically acclaimed debut album Endtroducing….. in 1996.

This past week, a new website launched that really caught my eye. Thru You is the creation of Israeli musician and producer, Ophir Kutiel, aka Kutiman. He’s taken a number of unrelated YouTube videos and compiled them together to create some really amazing pieces. You just have to see it to get the full effect and I was completely impressed.

Of course, all of these different interpretations of these mediums bring a lot of questions to the surface which I can’t quickly cover here, but like them or not, they are starting to shape the culture that we live in. Feel free to weigh in and share your thoughts!

I’m thinking about trying to expand this blog to allow me to post a bit more frequently and to include some more inspiration from around the internet as well as some more images and thoughts of my own. Most likely, this will mean shorter posts that are easier to digest in addition to the work that I’ve been showcasing already. We’ll give it a try and see how it goes and feel free to let me know what you think in the comments!

So, with that in mind, I’ve been looking at a lot of architecture and interior design lately. I’m sure it’s because Spring is around the corner and it makes me want to start some projects around my own home! I know very little about architecture, but here are a few things that I enjoyed looking at:

• The Glass House by Philip Johnson
• The Farnsworth House by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
• An amazing computer generated tour of Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright
• Dwell magazine just did a redesign of their website and they expanded their slideshow section.
• A Wikipedia entry on the architecture of Kansas City.

If you missed it earlier, I did a studio tour of a Studio 804 project midway through production that you might also find interesting.