Charles Bronson (band) Made Great Images

So simple, so beautiful.

The collages I make are colorful. I like a lot of color in them. Rarely do I mind if those colors match. Something that is striking and almost annoying is just as good as breaking out the color wheel and adhering to some Josef Albers thing I don’t understand. Yes, yes, this is a problem akin to playing a guitar that isn’t exactly in tune…eh, there’s a charm, I guess? Maybe I’m just lazy? Maybe I’m using my laziness to appear all punk like? Maybe I just like how an overload of color from washed out graphics in 1960’s magazines look next to one another? The more colors the better.

This interest in color is in stark contrast to the other half of my creations. Mostly this is because of necessity. If only the printers at work could print in full color, then I’d have full color. If there’s one thing I need to invest in it’s a full color and fast as hell, printer. You know the price of color inch, crazy! Since I don’t have access to a full color high speed printer, I have to print in black and white. These are mostly for broadsides, and add and passes that I mail out in between the collages. The broadsides and add and passes are mostly created from colors, digitally edited, and then printed. I make this at work in between grading assignments.

I print these monochrome black and white collages; on color paper I buy at thrift stores. Some of the paper has elaborate themed prints, like for a newborn baby or for Christmas announcements. I also like using children’s workbooks, the ones with the perforated edges. Every once in a while I’ll scan one of these random accidents and then send it through the printer another time with the new additions looming in the background.  Over multiple copies, the background detail generally gets washed out in favor of the heavy black on the top. Little additions add up, though. Sometimes the paper is solid color, but most, is ugly. I thought about printing these images “as is,” but they didn’t look so good. The grays and dull blacks of a color image printed in black and white looks terrible, like your uncles printed pictures from 1997. Black monochrome looks mean, it looks right. 

A few I made directly inspired by the record covers.

The perfect broadside is one that looks like Charles Bronson’s 1997 LP, Youth Attack. If you don’t know the band, they’re punk, we can leave it at that. They’re a nice intersection of punk / hardcore / crusty stuff. They liked to piss a lot of people off in their short and often satirical songs. White belts blazing with that horrible black dyed hair that everyone seemed to have in the late 90’s. Charles Bronson were that type of band that played your friends living room to twenty people in some sleepy college town. You know the living room, I Hate Myself played there just the week before. I never got to see Charles Bronson. I did see Orchid. I saw Usurp Synapse and Jerome’s Dream; do I get my cool points? Shit, I’m way off base at this point. Either way, that record cover stands out to me, or mores specifically their visual approach.

Bam!

Their records, and that famous t-shirt, the one almost as popular as that Locust one (yeah, you know the one, probably in pink) has been stuck in my mind for over twenty years. The iconography was stark, it was dense, it was handmade. It felt like punk should feel. Who needs colors when you have black and white to express yourself. The pictures on the back of records were just as stark, the long song titles written by hand. The art wasn’t perfect, it was human. It was practical. Simple tools and simple colors produced art that was visceral and ready to attack the senses. If anything, that’s what I aim for when I try and make a monochrome broadside. I want to make a broadside that is direct and sloppy, handmade, and a little shitty.

I like Lee Marvin so I made one in the same style.