Poster art, like album cover art and T-shirt art, has been part of the iconography of American music since the 1960s – that decade of so many great, misguided and/or lost causes – when music really started to make a statement. You can trace some of the evolutionary branches of rock and roll through its graphics: The “Sergeant Pepper” and “Magical Mystery Tour” covers; the Grateful Dead’s various skeletons; the Ramones’ American eagle; the Boss’ leather-jacketed back on “Bruce Springsteen’s Greatest Hits,” electric guitar rakishly slung upside down – and Weird Al Yankovic’s parody of the same image, with an accordion instead of Telecaster … Whatever the era, whatever the music, the art embodied and immortalized it long after the bands left the stage.

If you love poster art – but art that’s not so mass-produced that it’s as ubiquitous as Mick Jagger’s lips at a Rolling Stones concert – check out Portland, Ore.–based master silkscreen printer Gary Houston at VoodooCatBox.

I first saw a sampling of Gary’s work on a wall of Powell’s Books in Portland four or five years ago. I was and continue to be blown away: Some of Gary’s hand-printed posters for musicians’ tours and performances at local venues are a nod to classic concert posters (think Rick Griffin’s “Flying Eyeball” for Jimi Hendrix and John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers or any of the Fillmore East concert posters), but he has his own vision, his own style, and I think you’ll like it as much as I do – not just for the artwork but for his sense of time and place.

You see, Gary is a chronicler of musical events through the prism of the Portland music scene – not everyone who blows through town, of course, but music is a matter of taste. Certainly, he features lots of Northwest groups, like Alice in Chains, Death Cab for Cutie and Foo Fighters, alongside legends like B.B. King, Joan Baez, Jorma Kaukonen, Patti Smith, David Byrne, Steve Miller Band and Elvis Costello. Your biggest dilemma will be which prints to choose. They are really reasonably priced – generally around $30 each – but don’t dawdle: These knockouts are produced in limited runs (in editions of as few as 80 signed, numbered copies), and they SELL OUT!

(I need not point out that they make GREAT gifts … for yourself or the music lovers on your holiday shopping list.)

I recently interviewed Gary about his posters. You can see some of his work – along with that of dozens of other sensational artists – on display in “The Art of Musical Maintenance VI” through Jan. 25, 2010, at The Goodfoot Pub & Lounge (www.thegoodfoot.com), 2845 SE Stark, Portland, OR 97214, (503) 239-9292.

AmeriCollector: What’s your art background?

Gary Houston: I studied art at Wichita State University, Kansas, and Bethany College in Linsborg, Kansas. My formal background is more in drawing, sculpture and art history.

AC: How long have you been doing music posters?

Gary: Since 1994 or ’95. I was going through a divorce, and it was a good way to work out my angst and my frustration: It was a way of being constructive instead of being self-destructive. I also did posters back in high school and college, but not to the degree of the present. I do like the freedom that doing posters affords.

AC: Are you asked to do them by the musician or by the venue?

Gary: A lot of times we do posters for the venues, and sometimes we do touring stuff for the bands. A lot of times I do stuff because I want to: I’m not getting paid for it. I do it because I’m a music junkie: I’m a big fan of people who do really quality work, music-wise. I always think we do the “Americana of music”: I do a lot of blues/R&B/twang, with a little punk stuff. Obviously I do some things that harken back to the psychedelic era.

AC: Do you get to do what you want, or are you pretty much told what to do?

Gary: It depends on the band. For example, Los Lobos lets us do anything we want to do. Some bands micromanage, and that sucks the fun out of it.

AC: What is the printing process?

Gary: They’re silkscreen prints. I screen-print everything, I hand-pull everything. I don’t know how many colors there will be until something’s on the light table. It’s always a surprise, and I enjoy making changes, but it’s kind of addictive: I try not to be obsessive about it.

AC: Do you have help?

Gary: Someone does the computer work for me: the film, the typography and the scanning. Her name is Hailey and she’s very good at the digital stuff, and easy to work with.

AC: How many posters are in each edition?

Gary: Most of my editions are anywhere from 100 to well past 1,000 (for tours).

AC: Do you sign and/or number them?

Gary: I sign and number my stuff. There are times when I do an overrun and they don’t get numbered, but they’re all signed.

AC: Do you ever exhibit your work?

Gary: I’ve exhibited in flatstock shows in Austin, Texas, in Seattle and in Germany, and I’m currently in “The Art of Musical Maintenance VI” at The Goodfoot Pub & Lounge in Portland with around 50 other poster artists. It’s a spectacular show and will be up through Jan. 25. I’ve also had shows here in Portland and in Kentucky and California.

Many thanks to Gary Houston of www.voodoocatbox.com for giving us this great interview.

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Back in August, I wrote about an art form that truly excited me: the Polish poster. Why was I – and why do I continue to be – so enthusiastic about this means of expression?

For one thing, it’s great original graphic art, often with a wry political or social twist. For another, it’s an area of collecting that has not yet really been “discovered” by a lot of people – yet.

Therefore, it’s almost an open field for anyone who wants to buy one or many of these really great pieces of art. Some examples are already showing up in art auctions and pulling down pretty fair sums, but most are still very affordable (most are around 40 bucks or less).

The preeminent dealer in Polish poster art is Krzysztof Marcinkiewicz of PolishPoster.com (www.polishposter.com), based in Wroclaw, Poland. An accomplished photographer, Krzysztof is also something of a historian and social critic, which the following interview will show. As I indicated in my earlier story on Polish posters, I purchased two film posters – a beautiful limited edition poster for Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” printed in lush colors on heavy stock, and a moody image for Akira Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai” printed on cheaper stock, as that was how such ephemera was made in cash-strapped post-communist Poland. The posters shipped, well packed, in a tube and arrived swiftly. It was a very pleasant buying experience.

What follows are some questions I asked Krzysztof last year. Note that these are original posters, not reprints, and that he sells to U.S. galleries and dealers. My advice: Get ’em direct from the source while they’re still available.

AmeriCollector: Are you an artist yourself? How did you get interested in poster art?

Krzysztof Marcinkiewicz: Yes and no. I am photographer but not a poster artist. It is not related to posters in any way. You can see some (of my) photographs here: www.aristos.home. I grabbed my first poster from a local theater to hang it on my wall when I was in high school in 1980s and then was getting more and more. During my studies I started really collecting them and it also became my part-time business in early ’90s; I sold Polish posters for a few years in Berlin, then Paris and London.

AC: Do you know the artists personally? Do they do this work as full-time professionals, or are they struggling artists, like so many here in the U.S.? Are any of them famous in Poland?

Krzysztof: Yes, I know many of them, mostly young ones, but a few veterans of Polish posters too. I just talked yesterday with Andrzej Krajewski (www.polishposter.com/html/krajewski.html) about the possibility of making re-editions of some of his posters from the ’60s and ’70s He has lived in the U.S. since middle ’80s. Some of the artists commonly known in Poland are somehow “celebrities” (what an ugly word used to qualify some completely mindless creatures). An artist who is very well known in Poland is Franciszek Starowieyski and another one is Andrzej Pagowski.

AC: Is this kind of artwork popular in Poland? Does it appeal mostly to younger Poles? Is this an “underground” art form in Poland, and was it popular when Poland was still under communism?

Krzysztof: It’s strange: This kind of art, poster art, is not, in general, so much interesting for young people. Strange but true. It’s something that belongs to past times and is not very cool … or it is interesting for SOME people who don’t go with mainstream popular culture. During the communist times it was THE ONLY poster art existing here. “Polish School of Posters” is the name given to this fascinating phenomenon, which (evolved) from propaganda art (important during communist times, before any mass media, like TV, become popular; posters were a medium for information and propaganda) and a spirit of freedom and the Polish feeling of reality (extremely sarcastic sometimes). And it was effect of the work of great designers, teachers who were teaching students at art schools during 1950s.

This kind of art was much more popular during communist times than now. There were “Western-style” posters here during these times (but not) any official film distributors with their own material, so everything was done here. And because money was not a problem – there was no need to make ads for (purposes of) making bigger sales – film posters were more an artistic comment from the poster artist about the other work of art (i.e., the film).

There were also other types of posters, not just movie posters. Posters were designed for any event, like theater, exhibitions or simply anything.

After 1990 this kind of art became very limited. There are only some film posters in the Polish style done after 1990. Some theaters and opera houses still make them but no film distributors, as film producers make their own (ad) campaigns almost the same worldwide. Our dreams are planned and promoted by marketing departments now.

AC: There is a lot of subtle, dark humor in much of this work. Would you say this is part of the Polish spirit?

Krzysztof: Sure, it is. Some people say that this spirit is easy to make: You need to live between Russian and Germans for few hundreds years. You add diluted spirit (I mean a liquid thing) to make it 40-percent voltage. You drink the thing daily for some time and, sure, you can make Polish posters or at least make a humorous comment about it.

AC: Most of your posters are from the 1980s and later, I think. Was there less government control over artists from that time? Were more foreign films being shown in Poland from that time?

Krzysztof: I have posters from ’50s until today. There are more ’80s posters for sale on my site because there are more of them available, as they are newer. It was easier to collect them and get them in quantities. I have about 9,000 different posters in my collection, and you can see more ’80s than any others. The older ones are hard to get, and I usually have one or two copies of a title. They disappear from my site when they are sold.

AC: Which artists and which posters do you think are special?

Krzysztof: It’s too difficult a question, as it is subject of personal taste. The posters I like most are from the 1950s to 1968, and artists I like a lot are Starowieyski, Mlodozeniec, Krayewski and in fact many more.

AC: Where are most of your customers from? Do many Americans know about these posters?

Krzysztof: Still most of my customers are from the U.S. (Strange: I said “still.”) A few years ago about 80 percent of my customers were from America; right now it’s about 55 percent. The reason is that exchange rate changes over the last year forced some of my customers to spend more on gas than on something what they don’t really need. My prices become over 100 percent higher in the last four years for my American customers, only because the value of Polish currency is double its value four years ago, or the dollar value is half of what it was.

Polish posters are known in the States. There are many galleries that sell them, and most of the major poster dealers and auction houses carry them. I sell a lot of posters to dealers and galleries.

AC: Are these all original printings of these posters? How many were usually printed in an edition?

Krzysztof: Yes, these are originals. I always provide the printing date for each poster. If it says the year is 1989, that means it is printed in 1989. I don’t sell current reprints on my site, and in fact not many of these exist. My posters are originals. The film posters were printed for use in the theaters and on walls around the country and they have been printing them in the 4,000- to 10,000-copy range, depending on the title and time. But, assuming that in the middle 1980s there were 1,800 cinemas in Poland, you’re looking at very little material able to survive being mounted on walls, and most of them ended up in “paper heaven”: burned in the (furnaces) that were warming up the cinemas or simply ending up in trashcans.

There are much smaller print runs for theater or event posters: They didn’t need so many copies, as they were usually used in one city for an event. Today, the usual print run is low, up to 400 copies – like, for example, the “A Clockwork Orange” poster you bought: There were only 200 copies of these. The film was never shown in theaters in Poland, and this is the only Polish poster for the title, made as tribute to the film. There are no longer any more official posters like this in Poland, so some people who want the posters to continue to exist in the “Polish style” just make prints like this.

• Polish Art Posters – Part One, August 7, 2009

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All poster images courtesy of www.PolishPoster.com
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You’ve got to wonder: Did dour, humorless Soviet autocrats – or even their lockstep lackeys in Warsaw – really expect Marxism to blossom in captive Poland?

One need only visit PolishPoster.com (www.polishposter.com) for a small but wonderful window into the Polish mind – or at least that of Polish artists – to see that Poles are way too imaginative, sharp-witted, subtle, sarcastic and fun-loving to be the unthinking, uncomplaining communist slaves the Kremlin was hoping for.

I started getting a sense of the art of the Polish poster from the occasional examples that would turn up in Heritage Auctions’ (www.ha.com) weekly and signature movie poster auctions – as well as by searching for the posters of specific Hollywood films, only to find foreign takes on those classic American images. What a surprise! Artistically, these were not cheesy, amateurish knockoffs: Instead, not only was the artwork often superior to what the Hollywood film studios’ lockstep lackeys in L.A. or New York were doing, it was downright “edgy.”

Granted, it’s a lot easier to be witty when you’re satirizing a well-known image than when you’re creating a wholly original one. Turns out, the Poles are damn good at the latter as well.

Check out some of wild work on PolishPoster.com to get a glimmer of what I mean. There are some amazing circus, museum exhibition, opera and other event posters, notably Satyrykon, which started out in 1977 as an annual exhibition by cartoonists in Wrocław, Poland. According to the event Web site, www.satyrykon.pl, it is now a highly regarded international arts competition open to engravers, photographers, sculptors and, yes, poster artists.

Since I am a devotee of film, I gravitate to movie posters, and here’s where I found some eye-openers …

For example, the poster for sequel to Steven Spielberg’s take on “Moby-Dick”: the ever-popular summer beach flick “Jaws.” I never liked the poster of the monster shark torpedoing upward at the tiny, unsuspecting, crawl-stroking female swimmer. Now look at artist Edward Lutczyn’s great 1980 riff on the original “Jaws” poster in his “Jaws 2” promo artwork (priced at $197, and there’s a waiting list for it): a shark with two tooth-studded pairs of choppers – fantastic (in the otherworldly sense), bizarre and a hell of a lot more sinister. Like the shark in the film, come to think of it.

Or check out the 1983 “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” poster by Waldemar Swierzy ($166). Recall that “Butch Cassidy” was one of the great American rebel/buddy/adventure films of the 1960s – the polar opposite of what the Eastern Bloc stood for. Swierzy and other Polish artists do the same take: romanticized, often blood-spattered images of the doomed yet lovable, good-looking, idealized Western outlaws.

And the Communist party apparatchiks didn’t censor that? Were the bureaucrats too dumb to “get” the fact that the “Butch Cassidy” poster – not to mention the film – was all about bucking the system or die trying? Or did they appreciate this but, deep down, were liberal enough not to care?

In the second part to this story, I ask some Krzysztof Marcinkiewicz of PolishPosters.com some questions about the posters, the artists and the Polish artistic temperament. The posters, I note, often fetch pretty high prices on these shores, although Krzysztof’s posters go for under $20 to the hundreds, depending on their rarity, of course. The film posters are for productions both famous and obscure, from a range of countries; many are for revivals of older films, and most seem to run in the $35 to $55 range. (The above-mentioned “Butch Cassidy” posters are about $183 apiece, as they’re older and harder to get.) I have purchased two: a beautiful Picasso-esque limited-edition poster for Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” by Leszek Zebrowski from 2007 (now priced at $31) and a 1987 poster by Andrzej Pagowski for Akira Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai” ($66.) Note that the production quality will vary: The “Clockwork Orange” poster is very finely printed in knockout colors on good paper; by contrast, the “Seven Samurai” poster is more like a photocopy on cheaper paper. As Krzysztof explained, “99.99 percent of Polish movie posters printed before 1990 were on non-glossy paper, usually thin (like ‘The Seven Samurai’) but sometimes also heavier but with noticeable cellulose fibers visible; the surface of this paper was not so smooth like on ‘The Seven Samurai,’ it was different and you can feel the surface under your fingers.

“The funny thing is that this poor-quality paper looks very nice today, as its surface looks like and ‘art’ paper. It is especially nice on old 1950s-to-1970s posters.”

Read my interview with Krzysztof soon on AmeriCollector.com. Collectors, home decorators (always wanted a circus poster for the kids’ playroom or an opera poster for the office?) and holiday gift givers are bound to find really great, affordable stuff on PolishPosters.com. My posters arrived in short order and were meticulously packed in a tube.

• Polish Art Posters – Part Two, November 2, 2009

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More great posters
All poster images courtesy of PolishPoster.com.

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