Back in the ‘eighties I had this poster. It was an airbrushed graphic-art monstrosity that featured an icy, luridly made-up woman in profile—all white skin and scarlet lips and electric blue eyeshadow. Through those lips the woman was blowing (or maybe puckering) at a red telephone receiver which was, appallingly, melting as a result. The title was as subtle as the woman’s makeup: Long Distance Kiss. The piece was apparently the crowning achievement of an artist/illustrator named Syd Brak, and if anything ever screamed ‘EIGHTIES!!’ louder, then Bon Jovi would need to have been doing the screaming. But at the time I thought my poster represented the very height of sophisticated, Bowie-esque teenage cool. I wasn’t alone either. According to Wikipedia, in 1982 Long Distance Kiss was the top-selling piece of poster art in the world, when a company named Athena made a killing selling millions of copies of it to teenagers like me. So if we ignore for a moment that I didn’t buy my copy until 1985, at least I was in, if not good company, than at least … company. And no matter how embarrassing, it was still the first piece of ‘art’ I ever bought. So that must count for something.
To save face I’m going to pin my erstwhile enthusiasm for this pink and blue disaster on a three-month exchange I was shipped off to Germany to do at fifteen—an age when kids are apt to conclude that anything they ‘discover’ on their own is better than whatever they have available to them at home. Certainly there was no-one who looked like my pin-up girl in the sleepy Melbourne suburb that I called home. But in the German town where I spent my exchange there seemed to be any number of punky, impossibly cool young women strutting about with bleached hair and more makeup than Alice Cooper, that I would have been perfectly willing to have blowing long distance kisses at me. If any of them had noticed my existence (they didn’t).
So when it was time to go home the poster came too. What my parents thought of it I cannot recall, but I’m sure they didn’t like it—their taste running more towards gilt-framed reproductions of Renoirs. Anyway, the thing hung on my bedroom wall at least until I left home to go to college, when I rolled it up and took it to put on the wall of my dorm room. At some point it disappeared—replaced by an R.E.M poster or black-and-white Robert Doisneau print or whatever other mass-produced artwork seemed to best support whichever image of a worldly young sophisticate I was trying to cultivate at that point in my life. I have no idea what happened to my poster. Probably rolled up in the back of a closet at my parents’ house, I suppose.
In any case, we all move on and it’s interesting to see where we end up versus where we start out. These days in our house, the band posters and airbrushed femme fatales have been replaced with pieces by mostly Louisiana artists, many of which have appeared on the cover of this magazine over the years. One is a large abstract encaustic by Baton Rouge painter and sculptor Clark Derbes. Four feet by four feet and presenting a riot of interlocking geometric shapes, the piece reflects Clark’s ingenious use of repeating forms and compatible colors to serve as sounding boards for one another. It’s a technique that imparts a depth to his paintings and transcends their two dimensions. Looking at Clark’s piece is a bit like lying on your back looking at clouds—your mind suggests all kinds of things if you look long enough. Our kids enjoy this game too—staring hard at the painting then announcing rivers and rooflines and streetscapes and whatever other features their young imaginations present to them. A native Baton Rougean who spends much of his time painting and sculpting in other parts of the country, Clark was recently back to collaborate with Saliha Staib on the BR Walls Project’s first large-scale mural in downtown Baton Rouge. If you haven’t seen it you should come downtown and see how they’ve added color, depth and dimension to the west wall of the McGlynn, Glisson & Koch building on Florida Street. The mural is titled Cinq Ombres, (Five Shadows), and if you stop and look carefully you’ll soon see what the five shadows reference is about.
As publisher one of my tasks for each issue of Country Roads is to choose the piece of art that appears on the cover. This job is generally accomplished with much hand-holding on the part of our art director and cover designer ad infinitum—Anna Macedo. Actually, if anything about the look and feel of Country Roads appeals to you you’ve got Anna to thank, since it was she who came up with our overall design almost thirty years ago. Each month Anna and I go in search of a piece by a Mississippi or Louisiana artist that seems to articulate the theme of the issue in some way. This month’s theme—The Visual Arts—offered an opportunity to say something about art itself, so we’re excited to let this piece by Jim Richard do the talking. Richard is a New Orleans artist whose paintings depict modernist works of art placed within highly decorated home interiors—his comment on the lofty aspirations of modernist artworks and the artists who create them. Jim Richard is represented by Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, and he currently has a solo exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art entitled Make Yourself at Home.
So now if you don’t like the cover you know who to blame. Email me at james@countryroadsmag.com. And thanks for reading.
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