Mores McWreath on airbrushing, Dru Struzen, illustration, and Crippler.

I'm not exactly sure why but the airbrush is the first painting medium I really took up with major gusto as a teenager. It is a medium that I have associated with posters from the very moment I picked it up. When I really think about it, Drew Struzan is probably my first favorite artist. His posters for films like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Big Trouble in Little China, Dreamscape, etc. formed the basis of my understanding of fantastical cinematic narrative space in two dimensions. He did not invent the style of composing large portrait heads in clusters with smaller full figure renderings but he was an unquestionable master of the style.

My work over the past eight years has been primarily focused in the medium of video. I consider myself a video artist and I have been hard pressed to make work outside of a time based medium. I feel like the best way for me to make a two dimensional image that can hold all of the arcing narrative qualities that video can is by using the multiple clustered figures in action from the space of a Struzan painting. If the same people are repeated then a character can be established and developed.

I wanted to approach my 2UP collaboration as a kind of freelance illustration job in which my main goal was to make the band Crippler look as badass as possible. I love the way an illustration looks before it has text added to it because it often times does not complete the transaction it has been commissioned to create, it does not identify and make positive any consumable product. The empty space where the text is made to go is a space of potential and allows the entire image to maintain that state of potentiality. Crippler holds this same immense potential as a pairing of musical geniuses unrivaled in the history of sound.