Surrealist artists (first one here - Jacek Yerka)

Marty McFly wrote: Such a weird images, sinister and beautiful (in a dark way). I can imagine some of these as covers of some weird and obscure Prog albums :) Wait a minute, I saw the last one somewhere.

Love that picture!

 

I always thought that Hipgnosis (Storm Thorgeson) is very progressive and it was one of the reasons why I chased so much music that has his covers. With one massive bonus ... his covers usually amounted to a small commentary on what the music  was about and by and large for 40 years his covers have been fairly with it ... to the point that when I heard that Mars Volta declined one of their covers, I immediately got the idea ... the music is idealistic and sometimes over bearing ... and consequently have not heard it yet ... you will find very few covers that Hipgnosis has done that are not with it, or the comment from the picture really says something about the music! And it would not be too far below Storm's ability and style since he IS a major artist and HAS worked with the best, to not have an idea about some music ... he has heard more of it than all of us! Or his covers would not always be with it!

 

The other one, did not do a lot of work in rock music, in fact almost none. Cartoonist Scarfe is very good and very satirical to the point of being surrealistic many times and you can see this in the film of The Wall (Pink Floyd) but you never saw this on his books. Call it what you will but his cartoons coming alive translated into some serious surrealism, unless what caused that was more Roger Waters than anything else, since his view of things is a bit out there in left field.

 

All in all, Falk U Rogner that did the Amon Duul 2 covers all the way through Vive La Trance, was extremely surrealistic by using multi media and cartoons and stuff. And the inside cover of Wolf City is worth the poster, as is the inside of Dance of the Lemmings. Fabulous art and work. Just like the music and he played keyboards!

 

There are others, but sometimes the art is there ... but the music does not match. Klaus Schulze had an artist do some of his covers (Black Dance, Picture Music) and they were very Dali'esque, but a lot of those images would have fit better his album Audentity, for example, where things like "Sebastiam en traum" stand out as massively surrealistic and for most people's ears very weird.

 

It's a tough area all around, and the one thing missing in America more than anything else is the art to go with the music ... guess why most of the SF stuff is remembered? ... yeah ... a lot of the covers and the posters and the art that was all around. But Americans are way too commercial to appreciate art and have a friend or artist help them help themselves! Most art that gets remembered in history is always a "scene" ... and people that abstain and think their own is more important than anything else a la rock'n'roll and prog ego style, are not likely to make a dent anywhere artistically!