The Creation of ACOA Logo Art: Jon Roark

This blog post comes from Artist Jon Roark’s personal blog. We are thrilled to feature it here.

Since I am trying to make this a more regular venue for my random and sketchy observations, (get it? regular for random?) I am going to try to put down some more thoughts on recent projects. I am partway into my newest egg tempera, but not to a point where I wish to show it, so I am instead going to write about a new 3D construction I am putting together. A couple of years back I was mining a Beatles creative vein and built (at the suggestion of my writer/drummer/creative brother in law Mark Lindamood of Washington DC) an overlarge version of the Beatles Rubber Soulalbum cover. it is about 32″ x 32″ and about 5″ deep and is in a beautiful wooden frame built by my friend Jerry Dudley at Heritage HS. It was a particularly painful project because when I finished painting the cover and all four of it’s portraits on a piece of canvas, I had to cut them out. These were some of the best acrylic portraits I had done at this point (and along with a version of the Let It Be album cover and a 3D version of the Sgt Pepper center spread, probably my only acrylic portraits) and cutting them out of their canvas was simply put, scary as hell. I finished it, gave thanks that it looked so good and said to myself, “Enjoy it, that’s the last thing like that you’ll ever build.”

Right. So several weeks back, right at the end of fall break, I got an e-mail from my friend Ted Batt the Exhibitions Curator at the Academy of Fine Arts on Main Street asking if I’d be willing to interpret in a piece of art the new logo they were about to launch in a few weeks. The Academy will now be the Academy Center of the Arts and Ted included an attachment with the new multi-color logo. So even though I was really starting to enjoy my newest egg tempera, and hadn’t yet even opened the attachment I said, “Yes,” because I cannot resist the Academy and the friends I have made on the staff there. The problem is, when I looked at the logo, an idea came to mind – an idea of a sort I was pretty certain I’d never revisit. I wonder if I had been drinking Cabernet or Pinot Grigio when the e-mail came. Nope it was a Bordeaux they were selling at Magnolia Foods, a Domaines Baron De Rothschild (for a very nice price I might add.) I know because I was playing with the Vivino app on my phone and photographed the label. But I digress. The main point is French wine was involved in some manner. Not that I would have turned them down.

Anyway, I looked at the logo and an idea began forming, and not a simple one I’m afraid. So I at school the next day I enlisted the help of some of my students (and of course my pal Jerry Dudley) in building this massive thing. I was thinking of the old and new aspects of introducing a new brand, and in typical form, my own attraction to the age of the Academy buildings and the fact that some of the signage is signage people have seen day to day for 110 plus years was poking it’s nosy head into the proceedings. I had students in the closed off 6th Street this summer drawing the old doors and windows and anyone who knows my work knows I like bricks for some reason, so bricks were creeping in also. But it had to be lightweight so it could hang on a wall and suddenly I was thinking “make it sort of like the 3D Rubber Soul piece …” So I took the logo design, brought it into Adobe Illustrator and laid it into a 36″ square. I created a brick pattern as a background and while looking at my photos of the Academy I remembered a band of text at the top of the building overlooking 6th Street. I decided that would look cool on these bricks and that led me to ask myself, what else might be added that says Academy? Gradually a concept was presenting itself to me and just as gradually I was understanding it as it spoke to me. I remembered theatre and dance posters wearing away on walls in NYC when I was in art school, so it seemed I should probably have an old poster in there somehow and I had a photo of some cupids in plaster from inside and thought, “Why not have something from inside the old theatre?”

Lower right letter a with brick pattern in place and walls built.

At this point I could visualize it and was pretty certain I could build it. I just didn’t realize it would be such a beast.

Here’s the brick surface after Jamie and Hunter did the texturizing and after adding the poster at lower right.

So after the design, I had to build the backing for the bricks. Foam core didn’t come in sheets as large as I needed (at least not without shipping), nor was gator board large enough. I failed to mention I had planned to put a solid piece of gator board down as my base. But the piece I looked at was too small (would have taken three at $36 apiece) so I stuck with basic foam core. I had to seam one large and two smaller scrap pieces together and add a backing to them of cardboard. That gave me a pretty stiff and lightweight foundation upon which I could build a brick wall. So I drew the logo out centered on the wall and then guesstimated the size of bricks on such a wall. Every brick was cut out of scraps of foam core but was added in such a way that I had to keep the brick pattern but cut out the sections that overlapped the logo itself. This allowed the logo to fit down in the space between the bricks, adding a little extra stability to the logo construction. The logo is four round letters (probably Avant Garde or Futura) overlapping each other in a two over two layout. I decided to make the two A’s 4″ tall, the C  2″ tall and the O (as the least important element) only 1″ tall. I guess the “T” is silent. (Of The Arts)The overlap sections would be  3″. The letters were drawn out on foam core scraps and then the walls had to be built. Foam core doesn’t bend but can be made to bend by slicing lines close together (.125″ to .25″ spaces) vertically on the wall. When you glue the wall to the “roof” for lack of a better word, you simply bend the now pliable foam core to the shape of the letter. Once it is all done you can use modeling paste to fill in the gaps that open up in the wall and thus restore stability to the foam core. Simple. Or so it seemed.

Poster detail

This project actually went fairly quickly. The e-mail came during fall break from school leaving me with about three weeks to produce the final piece. Without Hunter G’s yeoman efforts throughout and his influencing Jamie S., Aliyah D., Blair B., Lindsey D. and Grace K.  to help we couldn’t possibly have gotten there.

So above is a photo of the white bricks with parts of letters in place. We actually didn’t glue anything down (the logo that is) until everything had a first coat of paint. So Hunter and Jamie painted all the bricks after I mixed paints and described what I saw as a way to paint an authentic looking brick. I drew on the Academy letters in the black panel at top and painted them in while Hunter began with a dark maroon “brick” color. the detailing on the bricks came by mixing a couple of reds just off from the base color, a darker one and a lighter one. Then we put the color down in a way they hadn’t considered, we used old sponge material out of several year old Apple Mac packaging and tore off parts to make irregular surfaces. They were told to dip the sponge in the paint and before daubing it on, wipe the sponge almost dry on a paper towel, then daub. It seemed to me like they had a blast doing it and in no time the bricks were looking like bricks. Jamie mixed a putty color for the mortar between the bricks and then a second color to texturize the first. Again, in no time flat they were done. I also wanted to add a poster from a long ago show at the Academy. Because of timing issues I chose to print it on thin paper after doing some aging in Photoshop. Once it was printed, I coated the bricks where it was going to be adhered with Polymer Medium and laid it down. The paper was allowed to soak up the glue and I used fingers to really push it down into the mortar spaces between bricks. I added another coating of Polymer Medium on top to really get the paper soaking wet (and very fragile). Then I began using an x-acto knife blade to pry between the fibers of paper and rip and mar the wet poster, peeling back sections of the poster, aging it on the wall, trying to make it appear to be peeling and deteriorating.

Early state of the cupids.

Final state of cupids.

At the same time I was working on a semi-bas-relief of some cupids from the interior plaster work. One huge problem. I had no clay. I had some sculpy but no way to heat it up as my stove at school wasn’t hooked up when they moved me into the old printing room (no way to vent it). So improvisation was the word of the day. I started by drawing the cupids out on a scrap of foam core (really using up the scraps) and then I cut out of scrap mat board 3 or 4 versions of the cupids with each one being cut slightly smaller then the one before. This isn’t like resizing and cutting a smaller version, this is laying down the original design and cutting the first one actual size, then pulling back from the edge and cutting another one, repeating that process several times. It gives you a semi mound in the shape of the figures. I then cut some foam core versions of parts of the figures and basically added small scraps of styrofoam onto those. Then it was modeling paste to smooth out the surfaces and enhance the relief aspects and finally it was all painted to reflect the photographic   sample I had. Not great, not bad. It gives the feeling of the old plaster in a state of disrepair.

Here you can see both an early state and the finished state. Wish I could have gone further but various technical issues got in the way as well as time. Anyway, the cupids were centered in the interior space created by the “O”. I glued them in place and then added two small brass screws just to keep them there. The brass screws also add an antique feel to the cupid grouping.

On to the finish. All the letters were painted black by the student helpers and we added a solid white surface on top to give the colors a base. The acrylics I used tend to be somewhat transparent, so they needed either a white base, or about ten coats of color. I opted for the white base with one or two coats of color. Hunter and I checked cmyk color mixes in Photoshop using the logo sample provided by the Academy and used the ideas presented in those numbers to mix colors for the logo parts. We did pretty well in that I don’t think we had to remix any of them. 8 for 8 right off the bat. Each piece probably has 5-6 coats, not because they have to have them, but because they just looked better with each coat we added. Eventually it all dried and I started to glue them in place. This was all built from a design laid down very precisely and they had fit together fairly well right up until this point. Now with glue on the board, I found myself wedging and bending and trimming each piece as I glued them  down. When I finally got to the last piece, one of the three inch high connectors between letters, you guessed it, no way it was going to fit. This is where the Rubber Soul experience came in handy because I immediately just cut the thing down to fit. Projects like this really teach you to think on your feet. On this connector I cut almost a quarter inch sliver out of one side and corner and then it slid right into place. The black walls were built, (they were too short so they had to be seamed together) painted and glued down. After painting the walls and while they dried, I stained and polyurethaned the beautiful wooden frame Mr. Dudley built for the project After that dried, we slid it down over the art and it almost fitted perfectly. Had to trim each corner just a tiny bit and it slid right down into place. Once we had it in place we discovered it was so tight that fitting it in had caused the back edge of one corner to pop loose but Mr. Dudley was able to clamp, glue and nail it back in place and finally all we had to do was add a protective coat to the entire thing. Finished.

So a long description to a fairly quick project. The students, especially Hunter G. were a huge help in getting it done and I have to believe learned a few lessons in the doing. I sort of lived in fear throughout that something might happen in the classroom and this would get derailed by damage. You just never know and if my classes weren’t so large that fear would probably not arise. So as soon as I could, it was delivered to the Academy and since they have now announced they have it, I feel like I can write about it.  I am realizing now that I never stated what my concept with this piece actually is. I was thinking of a phoenix, rising. But that isn’t exactly it, because my feeling is with a phoenix rising, it rises out of ruin. It actually was sort of a garden with something new arising in it’s season. So the old is still there, the bricks, signage, plasterwork, old theatre, history (if you know where to look) but growing, arising out of the old is this new expression, this new home for all the arts, the Academy Center of the Arts in the visual form of this logo. Still a mouthful, but who am I kidding, no one reads this stuff anyway.

The pieces of letters glued together

The entire thing comes together