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Brian David Downs, who creates striking band
posters and fine art.
So my name is Brian David Downs and I make a lot of
art when I'm out here in Spicer.
But I just think it's a bit quieter out here.
About a million ideas a second in my brain
so having just the quietness of the boonies
just allows me to sit in my head a bit,
sift through ideas, and really kind of organize.
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Small town America,
small town Minnesota, basically if you take one
step to the left you'll have a lake and take one
step to the right you got a lake,
one step back you got a lake,
and probably one step forward too.
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Yeah I started out doing the posters
basically a necessity of needing it for a band I
was playing in, needing posters to spread the
word, and after just a few of those,
other bands seemed to dig my style of poster making
and I pretty immediately started getting poster
jobs and being able to hustle it that way.
The posters then both work for the band,
promoting the shows and getting people out to them
as well as getting people to check out the more fine
arts side of my work by wondering who's making
these posters and what they're up to.
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The posters are very immediate.
They're kind of very loud, obnoxious,
in your face, and they're basically to be using to
basically get your attention and hold your
attention until you have gotten all the information
off the poster is kind of the function of it.
So I do try to stay with the function of the
poster, not just make an art piece that looks nice
on the wall.
That's nice if that happens but the big
concern is that it's immediate and that it gets
the information across to people so they know that
the event is happening.
The posters start out as like just a quick pencil
sketch, mostly free handing.
I'll trace little its and bits and pieces off of
like a Google image search but mostly it's just free
handing it and even if it is a trace,
I basically obliterate the image with kind of a,
not so much grotesque what I'm trying to do for but
just that loud, obnoxious kind of look to it.
I basically just try to stick around stuff
I dig though. I don't really take jobs
from anyone I don't first off dig
to some extent.
I have to be entertained by the band for me to
really feel like it's necessary for me to do
something with the band.
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There's a lot of Brian's art I like a lot.
Every time I look at his stuff I do form an opinion
one way or another.
It's nothing I have no feelings about.
One of the purposes of art is to arouse feelings in
people and they don't always have to be positive
feelings, they could be negative feelings.
But the purpose is to arouse some sort of
feelings and if it doesn't do that it's,
it's failed as an art.
And it works really nice with the posters cause
getting kids to come out to art shows where you
have a bit slower reads on the art is pretty
impossible to do, so having something as far as
a poster goes as much as it's an ad for the band,
it really helps me get my name and
art out there as well.
I pretty much have been trying to kid of stay in
flux series where the series of more or less
self-referential to themselves and take on
meaning but with like the posters with being
immediate the, the more so fine arts as some people
call it, it's a bit slower read,
it slows down the image.
It gets you to really take a bit more time and think
either what's with the images or if there's some
kind of thematics to it.
Where the posters are very fast,
abrasive, but once you kind of done looking at it
and getting the information,
that's about all there is to it.
With the more fine arts has a bit more depth and
you can basically spend years with it hopefully
and keep gaining new insight on it.
Working out in the country gives me a lot more free
space in my head room not to be distracted compared
to being in a larger city.
It's just basically me and the outdoors.
I'm a pretty big hermit when I'm
out in the boonies.
It's my dog and me and then seeing kind of fam
but as far as the art making,
it's a pretty isolated process and being.
Spicer's nicer.
It's quiet there's, you don't have your big chain
stores, there's, you know your gas stations and bait
shops, nice little ma pa diners.
Just the townie folk they're pretty-
-I'm a little bit weird looking so I understand I
get a few different looks here and there.
Overall though the people are really friendly,
just your good ol' small town folk.
It's always been kind of the back and forth between
country life and city life and fortunately or
unfortunately I've become pretty emoted to that,
of needing kind of both to exist and stay sane.
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