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. 

Sources of inspiration? Do you keep things around that inspire you? 

I have really been struggling with this lately... visually cluttered/inspiring space vs. neat and tidy and visually spare space. I used to always have tons of beautiful stuff completely covering the walls and shelves etc around where I worked, and I do really like to be constantly stimulated by great-looking stuff, but, I tend to get distracted really easily and I'm starting to learn how to save my tendency toward overdecorating and hoarding for spaces where I don't need to think about coming up with my own imagery. Having a separate studio REALLY helps, but it took me forever to figure that out. 

We both do look at a lot of older examples of beautifully designed everyday junk... stamps and matchboxes and book covers and movie posters and hand-lettered signage and luggage tags and old advertisements. I think we both have this little bias towards the way things looked before computers were an option; I definitely love looking at things like soap wrappers from the 1920s or greeting cards from the 1890s and it's really hard to imagine getting excited about contemporary versions of those same things. 

Older book jacket design is one of my very favorite things to look at, i can spend hours in book stores just looking at spines and covers. I love portraiture from all eras, and the natural world and also nature photography and scenery in motion. Seeing how other people organize their living and work spaces is actually a huge source of inspiration to me- I love rooms. I love architecture. I love sidewalks and brick and different types of roofing. I like accidental color combinations. I am really inspired by human bodies and the shapes made by various body parts coming together. I like rap videos. I like poetry. I like communication. I like voices. I like silent films and all kinds of animation. I like candy aisles in grocery stores. I like the windows of bakeries of other countries. I like multiples and repetition. 

Though LandLand seems mostly about posters, you’ve both worked on a huge range of projects: planners, postcards, little books. What projects do you have going on now?

Right now we are both working on books for Little Otsu as part of their Living Things series. I've always got ongoing/neverending/back-burner art book things going.. I've been trying to work on a book of portraits called "the Benefactors" for years now, maybe that'll manifest sometime in the next 12 months, hopefully. I have an idea for a series of motivational posters that should exist before the end of this year. 

The Little Otsu Annual Weekly Planner Volume Four. Illustration/Design by Dan Black

Of course we have a million posters on our plate right now- Ted Leo, Mt. Eerie, a Why? tour poster. And so many fantasy projects. Maybe we should make an all-text art print of Jes and Dan's never ending fantasy project list.. haha. There's a lot of records we want to release and book projects we want to talk people into letting us do. We have a plan for doing a series of art prints with different artists we love. We're also in the middle of beautifying our new studio space. I have decided I want to start making video art. I think about comedy routines.

Are you based in Philadelphia now? I saw that you were moving there.

We are actually still in Minneapolis! The big Philly move fell through last year, which is actually a really good thing. We've expanded our studio and really we can't imagine a more ideal building to be renting space from. 

Tell me about Minneapolis. What do you love about it? Frustrations?

Minneapolis is great. For real. I think because it's such a little island, people here really know how to make their own fun. It's also really practical. Most of our families are in MN, and while it's kind of far away from anything it's also central to everything. Anywhere else in the US you could want to drive to is pretty much equidistant, so we can give the rest of the country kind of equal love when making travel plans. That sounds ridiculous but I think it's true, we both love to take road trips and anywhere you could want to go within the US is equally do-able. The Mississippi is a great thing to live near, and we both like winter, so that's not a problem. Winter is a great time to hide out in a basement making things. Or, rather, it helps to justify the inclination to do so anyway. Of course I fantasize about living elsewhere, and I might at some point, but really I can't complain about Minneapolis much at all. If I were to move, it would either be to Milwaukee (which I think might be a slightly superior city) or somewhere way rural. Oh, I guess I do wish produce was cheaper in Minneapolis. That's about it. 

Can you tell me about your friend Matt, who helped found LandLand? What was he like and what was his design style like?

Matt Zaun was incredibly important in the birth of Landland. I don't think it would have happened without him. He named it, he and Dan built our studio, he and Dan were the ones with the gumption to think that this was something we could do full time and for real. I think they both had a fantasy of this kind of lifestyle and were able to encourage and feed off of the others crazy enthusiasm and energy for it, and really that's the only reason it exists. At that point, I was pretty non-committal, I was doing other stuff, and I only stepped up after Matt died and Dan needed someone to help. It's pretty crazy to think of how different things would be were he still alive. He'd be really stoked, for sure. He was a great designer- I like to think of the difference between the three of us, design-wise, as a spectrum. I'm on the way loose, rough, flowy and organic end, heavy on illustration, and Matt would be extreme opposite, a focus on typography, clean, modern, solid, Swiss. And Dan falls right in the middle. Matt was self-taught and had a real amazing nerdy enthusiasm for design and typography- he and Dan are really similar in that way. We miss him all the time. It's nice to get to work in a space that he built. 

Are you still in bands yourselves?

Hmm. Tricky question. I just went on tour with my band Best Friends Forever but now i think we are on a semi-permanent hiatus. Bri (my BFF bandmate) and I will probably have some kind of music project again at some point in the future, maybe more BFF or maybe something new and racier. I am hopefully about to start playing music with a few other bands here in Mpls soon, and maybe one in Milwaukee, but nothing super solid yet. I want to play music, it is a thing I do love to do...

What music is getting you going these days?

We played with this really great Belgian band called Alek et les Japonaises that really got me stoked about life and shows and touring. Also, the band we toured with, the Middle Ones, were great to get to play with and see every night and I'm excited to be home and get to listen to their recording. There are a lot of awesome bands to see in Mpls- Brute Heart, Dreamland Faces, Mother of Fire, Skoal Kodiak, a million I'm forgetting. I listen to a lot of older music and I like drawing to really mellow stuff, Sibylle Baire, Neil Young, Jana Hunter, Harry Belafonte, Georges Brassens, Will Oldham, D'Angelo, music with lyrics in languages I don't understand.  My roommate is a dedicated and super talented flamenco guitarist and so my home life has like a constant live flamenco guitar soundtrack running always, and I LOVE that. It makes life very dreamy. My best friend is in town for an extended stay right now and she and I spend a lot of time thinking about, listening to and singing R. Kelly. Prince and the Blow and Old Time Religion are all constants. I love the stuff Mississippi Records puts out, almost always.

What do you do if/when you have a block? When the art just isn’t happening?

I am trying to get better at just pushing through.. I think for a long time i had this idea that ideas sprung fully formed from the ether and without any effort on my part.. Now I'm starting to think about it like, maybe ideas are out there fully formed, but you still have to work to find them; ˆ have to work to keep yourself open and receptive and agile if I intend to be some kind of conduit. And I will have to execute some bad ideas to get to the good ones, but the real trick is to just keep going, to not be too hard on myself when I make something ugly, to not dwell on things, to remember that nothing is really precious. Look for a Landlandmotivational poster about it sometime soon!

Also, there's so much to do at Landland all the time, unglamorous stuff totally unrelated to making drawings, that when I can't draw any more I can always pack up mailorders or rack some paper or coat some  screens or clean the ink blobs out of the sink. Or, I'll eat some food and make a list and fret and eat some more food.