Dave Matthews Band 1

I submitted a number of sketches to mgmt and we settled on this one. My thinking relates to the title of Dave’s most recent album “away from the world” and the idea that artists often seek isolation from the rest of the world. The idea of a victorian style house floating on a iceberg had some weight to it and possibly summed up the idea Dave was going for. I associate this style of home with Dave’s neck of the woods; it’s distinctly east coast. Strangely, this architecture evokes some memories of childhood for me despite not growing up in the area.  

Here’s a bit about the process: I always find drawing things that need to appear random (like the star field) to be more difficult than they should be. Ultimately, I ended up dotting each star individually… it’s a real Christian Bale in American Psycho type moment but I wanted them to run across the sky at a diagonal and felt that was the best way to do it. The lighting effect ended up looking really Deco to me and I reinforced this with the headline lettering. Rendering the iceberg was the most time consuming element. I ended up layering three blueish green colors on top of one another (darkest to lightest) to achieve some of the more subtle gradations and value changes that ice faceting would have. The stars, moon and light water highlights all glow in the dark.

NOTES: 24 x 18 inches /// 5 screens (1 glow in the dark) /// signed and numbered edition of 600 /// numbers 195-600 sold at show /// June 11, 2014 at the Darien Lake Performing Arts Center in Darien, NY