FOLK ART:
“And then to fix an appropriate, palpable entrance to these song cycles, Wade turned visual, material artist, and began to sheath his albums in hand-fashioned artwork. His cover creations proved adult and twisted and challenging to the eye, somehow giving back the light they absorb, often bearing only the most primitive outline of shapes and words and creatures. Traces of this mature work had shone earlier in the makeshift promotional material he had long pressed and passed out to the interested. For these, he would turn Kinkos collagist, making the platen of the credit-card copier his original surface. There he would lay his favorite photographs from his lengthening career, many from the Bluegrass Professionals period, at the Capitol Theater, and from the festivals, these snaps of him with stars. Overlay perhaps six photos to a simple manuscript page and press go. Once the copied results were examined and accepted, Wade would hand write captions and sketch other pleasing graphics onto the page. Copy again. And over again, to get just the right size. He would do the same with press clippings, old reviews and liner notes and ads and calendar announcements, each in place, organized Wade’s way, not chronologically, but like a stonewall builder, bedding each cutout to rest against the others. Several sheets of these made the Wade Hill packet.
But once comfortable, skillful, with the pressman process, Wade journeyed to deeper abstraction. To start, most often, he would cull from his more contemporary photographic portraits, usually ones given to him, the angles and glances and getup he found most cool in the image of his now older self. Wade is picky and precise. These self-figures he would then enlarge until the preferred size and cut into silhouette. Brought to a desired scale, he could then place them into literal or fantastical scenes, mixed and mingled often with hand-drawn set pieces or with stimulating images cut from magazines — lighting bolts, lips and fangs, skeletons. On his own countenance, or on others, he might blacken white teeth, or put shades where spectacles had been. With the images properly embellished and fitted into place, and perhaps resized again, copy after copy, sixteen-cent steps to fulfillment, Wade would then draw and mostly marker over the images, thick and wet, bleeding to darken and deepen the scene. The colorized nightmare worlds that his likeness populated glowed too with hints of silver pen and yellow highlighter. In the pools of ink one might make out the stop-start, yet studied pressure and brush of Wade’s hand agrasp the cheap implements. Eventually, he would stop, but never quit. These were just prototypes, always, he’d say, as he reluctantly cut and slipped them into the jewel cases.”
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“And then to fix an appropriate, palpable entrance to these song cycles, Wade turned visual, material artist, and began to sheath his albums in hand-fashioned artwork. His cover creations proved adult and twisted and challenging to the eye, somehow giving back the light they absorb, often bearing only the most primitive outline of shapes and words and creatures. Traces of this mature work had shone earlier in the makeshift promotional material he had long pressed and passed out to the interested. For these, he would turn Kinkos collagist, making the platen of the credit-card copier his original surface. There he would lay his favorite photographs from his lengthening career, many from the Bluegrass Professionals period, at the Capitol Theater, and from the festivals, these snaps of him with stars. Overlay perhaps six photos to a simple manuscript page and press go. Once the copied results were examined and accepted, Wade would hand write captions and sketch other pleasing graphics onto the page. Copy again. And over again, to get just the right size. He would do the same with press clippings, old reviews and liner notes and ads and calendar announcements, each in place, organized Wade’s way, not chronologically, but like a stonewall builder, bedding each cutout to rest against the others. Several sheets of these made the Wade Hill packet.
But once comfortable, skillful, with the pressman process, Wade journeyed to deeper abstraction. To start, most often, he would cull from his more contemporary photographic portraits, usually ones given to him, the angles and glances and getup he found most cool in the image of his now older self. Wade is picky and precise. These self-figures he would then enlarge until the preferred size and cut into silhouette. Brought to a desired scale, he could then place them into literal or fantastical scenes, mixed and mingled often with hand-drawn set pieces or with stimulating images cut from magazines — lighting bolts, lips and fangs, skeletons. On his own countenance, or on others, he might blacken white teeth, or put shades where spectacles had been. With the images properly embellished and fitted into place, and perhaps resized again, copy after copy, sixteen-cent steps to fulfillment, Wade would then draw and mostly marker over the images, thick and wet, bleeding to darken and deepen the scene. The colorized nightmare worlds that his likeness populated glowed too with hints of silver pen and yellow highlighter. In the pools of ink one might make out the stop-start, yet studied pressure and brush of Wade’s hand agrasp the cheap implements. Eventually, he would stop, but never quit. These were just prototypes, always, he’d say, as he reluctantly cut and slipped them into the jewel cases.”
