Pile: “The Birds Attacked My Hot Air Balloon”
It’s high time to talk about Gideon Bok in a Pile write-up.
The Maine-based painter has been bouncing around New England since forever. Got his MFA from Yale University. Don’t hold it against him! Steve Keene got his degree from the same trainstop and has been a fine, upstanding contributor to arts society, especially the album cover niche, through some impressive album cycles (hi, Pavement).
Is Gideon Bok on the same trajectory with Pile?
Pile’s “Scaling Walls” coverOur research department has been feverishly investigating the points of contact between Gideon Bok and pop music album covers.
We’ll list the stuff we already know: credit Bok with the cover art for the recent Pile single “Scaling Walls.” He also provided inside cover artwork for the recent LP All Fiction and the outside cover for the latest EP Hot Air Balloon.
Most bands are aiming for a thing, and getting a signature aesthetic helps get them closer to that thing. How cool is it to have a bona fide fine artiste provide the visual aspect for that aesthetic?
What to expect from a Bok album cover? Have a look at some photos, available via the Alpha Gallery. Some abstract expressionist painting techniques wrestled back into the world of representation. The guy likes drips, Matisse’s “The Red Studio”, and continental philosophy.
He also likes rock n roll, if the amps, drumkit, and mic stand squirreled away within his interiors is any evidence.
The artist supplied the cover art for Prewn’s LP (EP?) Through the Window too. Which, by the way, is the “same” painting used as cover artwork for Pile’s single “Scaling Walls”. Put that in scare quotes because it’s the same painting at different stages.
Prewn’s Through the Window coverThe Pile version (which we haven’t found a title for…) is the earlier version, plotting out the basic geometry and colors of the visual field.
The Prewn version reels the pure shapes & colors back into the representational fold by reframing the scene as a studio interior. In the center sits a rocking chair, which you could call a recurring Bok motif, or you could just say he’s painting the same room with the same stuff in it again and again. This particular painting is called “Izzy In The Studio” – presumably that’s singer-songwriter Izzy Hagerup (of Prewn) sitting in the rocking chair.
Hagerup’s label Exploding In Sound Records seems unaware that the painting for Prewn’s album cover is living a second life as the cover for a Pile single from their EP Hot Air Balloon. Or maybe they just don’t feel like getting into it on Twitter with a stranger. That’s fair!
Either way the two Bok covers are the same painting. No doubt he’s worked the same theme over and over in different paintings, but what doesn’t get repeated (unless you’re a complete psychopath of a painter) are the angle, velocity, location of drip marks. In the left half of both pictures there is a long single vertical drip next to a shorter pair of two vertical drips. There’s more drip evidence if you look.
Even more obvious than drip sleuthing, the basic geometry of the painting remains the same between the two versions. Plus, the figure playing guitar in the right half of the Pile version has been hastily and only partially concealed with a hanging guitar, among other studio debris.
In fact, not only are the two paintings the same, they aren’t particular distant versions of the same painting. Starting with the Pile version as the foundation, Bok could have polished off the Prewn version in a single sitting. Judging from the hasty concealment of the guitar player, it’s likely.
Also, check out Pile’s new EP Hot Air Balloon and our highlighted single “The Birds Attacked My Hot Air Balloon”. The title is proof enough the lauded glumcore rockers have a sense of humor.
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Piano-forward spiritual jazz on that Alice Coltrane grind.