Mashing Things Up
- art58koen
- Jul 22
- 2 min read
Usually, at least once a day, I surf the Net looking for potential 'candidates' for my Art For Art's Sake series (*).
This can vary from matchbox covers to Rembrandt, an old advertisement to a comic book fragment, or an old obscure pulp magazine cover from the 1930s to an lp cover...
The longer I'm doing this, the more possibilities I encounter!
However, it doesn't happen often that I immediately see a 'connection' between 2 pictures; in fact, I just save whatever looks remotely interesting and file them in folders.
Some time ago, I stumbled on a few old lithographs from the late 1800s, depicting scenes in the Far East, excellent quality, high resolution scans, in other words, perfect material!
Two pictures really stood out, one of Bangkok in 1873, the other of Tokyo, the same year.
But for whatever reason, I couldn't find any suitable 'companion' art for either of them, so I put them away...
Later try again!
A friend of mine suggested using some of my own photos for AFAS as well, which took a while to sink in, but eventually I came up with a piece.
Another photo of a Mekong Boatman I took a few years ago, I had put away for possible use as well, but my few attempts to combine it with old maps didn't really 'work' for me, so I decided to give it a break.
What 'works' for me is, of course, highly personal, but it has to appeal to me in the right way, it can't be that one piece 'overwhelms' the other one or that there's no connection (topic, contrast, etc) at all.
A few days ago, I finally had an idea for a different approach. Instead of adding something to the sky of the Bangkok 1873 lithograph, I decided to use it as the background for my Mekong Boatman...
And this morning, I had been mucking about with the Tokyo one, trying to mash it up somehow with a record cover of Yellow Magic Orchestra, when the back cover of their 1980 "Computer Game (Theme From The Invaders)" 12-inch gave me the answer!
Immediately, I abandoned YMO and began searching for vintage Atari screenshots instead.
The next part was easy, only a matter of using the right size and selecting the necessary bits!
I think both pieces came out pretty well!
The only thing I find less positive is that I always try to give credit to the original artists, but 'failed' in a way this time...
Problem is that with those old lithographs, they seldom acknowledged the original artists; for these two, only the printing company (Wilhelm Korn) was mentioned...
(*) Previous AFAS posts:
Note: I post daily new AFAS cartoons on:
Nice!