When I made the cover to “‘I Made This Album on Anti-Psychotics” I picked the colors very specifically. Not for any sentimental or emotional reason, but mostly because they balanced each other out. Like with any kind of art I create, I sent a photo to my mom, and as always, there were many questions? “Why is your brain green?” “Why did you base it off of such an unflattering photo?” “Why did you pick orange as the background color?” I didn’t know. Maybe because orange is my least favorite color.
I am by no means an art expert. I find comfort in Van Gogh’s paintings, I enjoy museums quite a lot, I see potential paintings around me but I don’t “know” art. I do enjoy making it. Before I wrote music I painted a lot, I don’t paint a lot anymore, but I wish I did.
Making the original artwork for “I Made This Album on Anti-Psychotics” took about 15 minutes. I took the most unflattering selfie I’ve ever taken. No makeup, hair cut super short, not making eye contact with my camera. I used acrylic markers and a pen to depict my face. I knew I wanted to make my brain a color that stood out against the rest of my face; but the green, yellow, and orange were mostly a whim. When I digitally cut the picture out to put it on a background the only choice to make was an orange background. I hate the color orange. I’m not a halloween fan, I find oranges and orange juice disgusting, and I’m not even a particular fan of sunsets. I don’t know why that’s the color palette I chose, and it didn’t make me love the color any more.
When it came to making a cover for the reimagined album I knew the most obvious choice would be to recreate the original cover a year later. I actually wear my glasses now, my hair’s grown past my shoulders, and despite what I said in my song, I do want to be pretty sometimes. And for the first time in years, I did feel pretty.
After swearing I would “never use a picture of myself as an album cover” I came up with the concept of me standing with my one year old record. David Cichocki brought it to life. I have never felt as seen as I do in those photos, specifically the cover photo. And when I first saw it, I have to admit, I thought “maybe orange isn’t so bad.”
Having recently moved to an apartment, there isn’t much space to set up a place to paint, but art is intertwined with all of my music. Whether it’s flipping through coffee table books of Van Gogh and Picasso to find inspiration for a song, or drawing faces in my notebook when I get writer's block, it is absolutely inseparable from the music I create. To promote the album I made portraits of all of my featured friends, digitally drawn against an orange background. This was a giant undertaking, but one that made me very happy. I love art, and I love self portraits, and when it’s the backdrop to portraits of my friends, I even like the color orange.