Musician Portraits

Following the first Post-It Jesus, I started doing a series of musician portraits with the post-its, and musicians have remained some of my favorite subject matter.  Here are some of the portraits:

 Both of these pieces are from the spring of 2005 and were part of my senior portfolio.  The one on top is Jerry Garcia, and the one underneath is Tupac Shakur.  I hadn't learned the stenciling techniques that would be used in later post-its, so both of these pieces had to be huge in order to allow the detail.  Each is roughly three feet tall and four feet wide.  Both were sold to a local recording studio in Memphis.

One of the first things I made at Kenyon (fall 2005), this portrait of Jimi Hendrix still hangs in the stairwell at the Horn Gallery on campus.

This portrait of Bob Dylan was commissioned by my friend Andrew Stein.  I had a policy for a while where I would let the commissioner of the piece hold it while I photographed it, but a few slanted portraits later, I did away with this tradition.  Again, I had not yet been taught the stenciling techniques, so everything on this piece is done with simple scissors.  Also, the lower righthand corner features an early version of an artist signature that I was toying with for a while.

A portrait of Miles Davis commissioned by my friend Zak Sturm during fall of 2005.  We all liked this piece, but we had to admit that it looked a little creepy hanging there on Zak's wall.

Johnny Cash commissioned by Keith Shayon in fall of 2005.

A young Elvis Presley commissioned by Jena Shellito in fall of 2005 (or maybe spring of 2006 at that point?).  I experimented with some new layering techniques on this one that worked for this piece but were ultimately abandoned.

My friend Justin Greenlee is a diehard U2 fan, and in the spring of 2006, he commissioned this piece, requesting that the Bono iTunes ad be used as a reference point.  Some of the work around the mouth and eye features the first incorporation of stencil techniques into post-it art.

Another Jimi Hendrix, this one was commissioned by Nick Petricca in spring of 2006, and it even makes a cameo appearance in Walk the Moon's "Anna Sun" video at one point along with an Expert poster as a nice little nod to our time working together.

To show what a difference those stenciling techniques made, here is a post-it piece from Christmas of 2010 that I made for my uncle, Rick "Uncle Elvis" Sandidge.  Uncle Elvis has a side gig as an Elvis Presley tribute artist, and many friends have questioned whether my basis for this piece was a photo of Elvis or of my uncle.  That's a secret I'll keep to my grave.  So that there's no question about the detail offered by Jeremy's stenciling techniques, this piece is only about the size of a sheet of notebook paper.