Ele Annand

I met Ele Annand down at Penland School of Arts and Crafts, where she is on a fellowship. She's a real rad woman, and her art is quite fine. Love the subtlety and texture of this piece.

Banduk Marika

Interview: Jessica Seamans of LandLand

LandLand is a two-person design collective based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They make band posters, record sleeves, and art prints that are just gorgeous. Sometimes their work is diaphanous and loose--all watercolors and organic shapes, and sometimes more line-based and concrete, reflecting the different design styles of the two artists, Jessica Seamans and Dan Black. Always the posters contain richly interesting hand-drawn typography. I recently got the chance to shoot a few questions at LandLand's Jessica Seamans, and I'm so excited to share with you her answers:

Where are you guys from originally?

I grew up in rural central Minnesota, and Dan was born in Texas and then lived in rural Utah and then Mankato, MN.  

How did you each get into drawing and making art? When/how did you meet each other?

We're both lifelong drawers, which I guess is pretty typical.. There was a lot of really visually exciting stuff around my house as a kid, for example, my dad had an amazing record collection and I spent so much time at a very young age kind of poring over the album art and fantasizing about the worlds being hinted at by the paintings on the covers of his albums. He and I spent a lot of time analyzing them and I think as a result I kind of learned to use drawing as entry point into more exciting imagined realms. That was kind of how I played- I would draw out my fantasies. Anything I've done since then is probably just an extension of that.  

   

Dan's actually always been really into letters and signage- it's really kind of funny to think about how the things we get to do now are very much exactly the same things we liked doing as kids. It feels pretty dang lucky. He used to make little books of drawings of road signs, for fun. His dad used to steal traffic signs for him as presents. He loved thinking about and drawing letters and lists and diagrams. 

We met when I tried out for a band that he had just started. It was pretty random. I was 18 and he was 23. We had actually been in contact before that- I was living in Seattle and had bought a poster at a show and then noticed it had been printed in Minneapolis. I was about to move back to Minneapolis and had a vague idea that I wanted to be screenprinting and so I decided to take a shot in the dark and email this Dan Black person and ask if he needed help or anything. We emailed back and forth a few times but the ultimate answer to my question was no and we never had any plans to meet or anything when I got to Minneapolis. After we were in this band together for a few days we discovered that we had had this previous interaction and I think maybe because it then felt like some kind of weird fate, I was able to weasel my way into being part of his tiny 3rd-floor apartment living room print shop, which was at that point called 2222 Screenprint Facility. This was late 2001. 

What do you find yourself drawing most often? Where do you find yourself drawing most often, or most fruitfully?

I used to draw a lot more animals or natural-world type stuff, now I guess I make more things that involve people or structures or patterns. We both draw a lot of buildings and patterns, actually, but we have pretty different approaches. Dan tends towards more technical-looking imagery. He does a lot of lettering and objects that involve lettering, like billboards and building facades and postage stamps. My stuff tends to be a lot looser-looking, to put it gently.  

We both try to do a lot of our Landland-related drawing in the studio. I get really easily distracted, especially when I'm in my comfortable home, so kind of trapping myself in a dungeon like basement actually helps me to stay focused and get more drawing done. For me, more important than the physical space is actually just being able to get into a totally focused mental zone. Which can be hard anywhere but can also happen anywhere, if you make it. 

Karin Ruggaber

via I'm Revolting