A lot can be said about Jay Ryan. He had a brief stint in Braid as their bassist before forming the amazing instrumental band Dianogah. He’s done hundreds, maybe even thousands of screenprinted posters for many of Chicago’s music luminaries and his artwork has a distinct style that is all his own. Take a few minutes and browse through some of his artwork in the book, 100 Posters, 134 Squirrels: A Decade of Hot Dogs, Large Mammals, and Independent Rock or check out his portfolio on thebirdmachine.com
Hum
This Hum print was made during the Deepwater Oil Spill of 2010. Though the sea turtle isn’t a specific reference to any lyrics, fans of Hum would hopefully feel that this animal would be an appropriate subject for a Hum print. The turtle is having some mechanical difficulty, apparently, but is successfully outdistancing the oil coming in the upper right edge of the image.
As with most of my posters up to when I made this, this print was designed without the use of computers. The speckled texture in the background was achieved by spray-painting the films.
Andrew Bird
This Andrew Bird print was for a show the night before Andrew’s appearance at Lollapalooza 2009. With his touring schedule during that time, any stop in Chicago became a sort of homecoming, with barely any time to unpack. This suitcase contains various objects Andrew either actually owned (blue shoes, striped socks, sock monkey, etc), or some references to things he liked, used, sung about, or joked about.
Pelican
Pelican is a metal band that is somehow different from other metal bands. Maybe it’s that they don’t try to be naughty or evil, or something. This poster tries to sort of stand next to the typical metal imagery, but this storm god is a raccoon, with lightning and water coming forth from his eternal being, or something… I’m not totally sure about that. The print is four screens (basically: red, blue, yellow, grey), with the variations in the lightning color achieved by printing yellow on top of the blue and the red screens. The raccoon color is the blue ink on top of the red.
Tortoise
This Tortoise print was made for a benefit concert which was to help a family with an ill child, so I wanted to make the print appropriate for kids. The subject matter doesn’t have much of anything to do with Tortoise, but I don’t feel it’s inappropriate either.
Shellac
This print for Shellac and The Ex from 2010 started off with an idea offered to me by the members of Shellac, who suggested that their band could be depicted as a hockey team, aggressively bearing down on the members of The Ex, who could be depicted as innocent young ice skaters “straight out of a Vermeer painting”. The idea, as I worked on it, eventually developed to inserting hockey players INTO a Vermeer painting. As far as I recall, this is my first appropriated imagery, and one of my first forays into four color process printing. I scanned the best image of Vermeer’s “Milk Maid” painting out of a book from the library, and dropped some hockey players into the picture, drinking milk which the maid has just given them. Bobby Dixon, of Austin’s Kollective
Fusion, helped me create the CMYK separations, and I added a white underprint, as well as a
second black layer on top. Instead of CMYK, this print ended up being WYMCKK. Not a
completely successful print, but it was fun to work on, and covered new territory for me.
