Artist Ken Eppstien, of Nix Comics fame, presents a pop-up exhibition in Gallery B the month of August.

Ken describes the project:


I began drawing my own picture sleeves for 7” records out of necessity. I had a significant collection of 7” records with plain white sleeves left over from my old record store and they needed to find a new home as I made space for new issues of Nix Comics.

Thing is, I was both financially and emotionally invested in these records. Financially, they were all parts of collections I had bought for resale, so I felt obligated to get as much return on them as possible to sink back into making comics. Emotionally, I felt like these records deserved to be a special part of someone’s collection. Not an easy sell, given that 7”s appeal to a fairly niche group of record buyers.

I knew that one of the things that help’s 7” records is picture sleeves, just like full albums are often sold thanks to great art. (For instance, without making judgment on the quality of the music, I doubt that  Molly Hatchet would have sold many albums without the often incongruous art of Frank Frazetta gracing their album covers.) So I decided to start paring up some of these records with my own hand drawn picture sleeves, just to see if I could sell them at comic shows and record shows. Turned out there was interest in the pieces at both types of events.

Of course, I’m no Frank Frazetta. Early on I decided that the best way to draw these was to take the same casual approach that I would in my sketchbook: Gather up some cheap supplies and start drawing while I play the records. I purposely let my mind drift freely to whatever stories it wanted to spin. I also decided that I would approach each sleeve as a one panel gag cartoon, riffing on the title’s word content if the not the actual lyrical content of the songs on the record. The result of that has been that I have ended up using a lot of pop culture touchstones to build funny little narratives and inside jokes for comics and record people alike.

A couple years ago I published a collected book of the first 120 (or so) sleeves and I am currently working on completing a second collected  volume.

Join us on August 13th, from 6-8pm while Ken spins records while his work is on display.