The 3 artists that I am looking at are Vaughan Oliver, Am Cassandre and Ladislav Sutnar.
Vaughan Oliver ( Vaughan Oliver – Wikipedia ) is an English artist & graphic designer best known for his work with various musical artists. Inspired by Yes and Asia album cover artist, Roger Dean, he primary became an artist for album covers, starting as an in house artist for record label, 4AD in 1980 as well starting the artistic partnership, 23 Envelope with Nigel Grierson. Oliver has made art for The Pixies’ entire discography and other artists on the label, such as Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil and Clan of Xymox. His main inspirations for his art is the previously mentioned Roger Dean, surrealist artists like Salvador Dali and pop artists like Andy Warhol. He utilizes various forms of art through his work such as having photography, typography, graffiti and photo manipulation. His work gives off a hazy, abstract feel.
I enjoy his work with these cover art designs as I get the feeling that he tailored the art for these albums to look as the albums sound from the rustic, dark absurdism of the cover to Pixie’s Doolittle to the ethereal feeling of Cocteau Twins covers.
(cover of Pixies’ Doolittle)
Am Cassandre ( Cassandre – Wikipedia ) was a French painter, poster designer and typeface designer who was known for his use of shapes in his art. Cassandre was inspired by the French wave of Cubism art, which influenced the Art Deco style of art and you can see the style of both art forms in his art. Using an airbrush, he designed posters for a lot of clients, mostly travel companies through his advertising agency, Alliance Graphique. Cassandre was known to use grids as an outline of his work, as a way to convey his own unique way of rendering various elements of art through a mathematical lenses from perspective, proportion, contrast, flow, form, etc. He uses this to great effect in his posters of ships, as it shows off the imposing height of the ships through it’s use of bold, simple shapes and an intricate understanding of proportion and framing.
(L’Atlantique, 1931)
Ladislav Sutnar ( Ladislav Sutnar – Wikipedia / Ladislav Sutnar | MoMA ) is Czech graphic designer known for being a pioneer in information architecture, poster designs, toy designs and his series of pinup art. His work has been commissioned by various employers like the U.N. His work is characterized by his use of straight lines and primary colors, inspired by the early 1900s Dutch art movement, De Stijl. Similar to an artist like AM Cassandre, he used flat colors and straight lines to render art for a variety of means such as poster designs and health and safety symbols. His series of pinups, Strip Street used very similar techniques as his previous work, but added pop art inspired elements to his work, despite expressing his distaste of the style.
I particularly like these series of paintings due to how he used mathematical knowledge of the various elements it comes to making art and used it to design very appealing cartoon designed posters.
( his Strip Street series)