[ad_1]
 |
| Back to the 80s, 90s, and every other decade ever! |
In my last musing, we concluded
my recent ‘Your Art Career’ series by unpacking crazy ideas to discover new
niches. This week, we take one of those niches and unpack it in a lot more
detail. So, sit back, grab a coffee, maybe even a packed lunch, and join me as
we go on quite the trip back to the past
with a retro revival!
I have always been fascinated
with the past, whether it is my own past and memories of my childhood back in
the days when the responsibility monster didn’t enter the house through the
letterbox disguised as a bill every morning, or whether I’m discovering an
historic era that I had only ever read about in books or watched as a
documentary on TV. The past fascinates me, or at least much of it does. I‘m
much more into the 1960s onwards than I am about the 1860s unless we’re strictly
talking about art and then I’m all in from about the 1400s.
 |
| Press Play On Tape, one of my latest creations that takes us back to the eighties! Part of my brand new Yin and Yang Collection! |
I love looking back at the
history that has been made during my own lifetime, the defining moments that have
moved history along. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the space race, the cold war,
the way people would use language differently in the 70s, even how people just
a few decades ago imagined what the future might look like is something that fascinates
me. Where’s my flying car? What really fascinates me is how our own pasts have
been documented by artists and that sense that we really do have many shared
experiences as a human race.
I am never happier than when
I’m flipping through an old magazine, I love the slight aroma of childhood that
emanates from the pages, I even love looking at the adverts because those were
the days pre-the internet when a magazine would be the only way of finding out
what the future held. The magazine was a
physical, hold in your hand experience, unreliant on an electricity supply to
read it and you could take it anywhere.
Over the years I have become a
magazine hoarder, retaining old computer magazines and those that would
showcase the latest technology, and I’m unwilling to part with them for fear of
losing memories.
Whenever I pick them up now, I’m
intrigued by how much currency we gave to some technology which was billed as
the next big thing only for it to then fizzle out within a few months after
release. It’s surprising just how much technology got released only for a
limited time and even more surprising just how many of us fell under its spell
as early adopters.
I’m not so naïve as to think
that my rose-tinted glasses of the past only ever show the world through a lens
of positivity, there are periods of history in my own lifetime that I would
sooner forget. All too often I have rediscovered something from my younger days
only to find out that it wasn’t quite how I remembered it.
Some things, and even some
places, maybe even some people really don’t age that well and the memories are often
way better than the reality ever was. As we grow, our own expectations grow
with us, life was much simpler back in the day, but was it really or were we
just too young to realise that it wasn’t? We certainly didn’t have the
distractions that we have today but neither did we have the access or
convenience that we have today.
Whilst some of that old
technology never sold very well, there is no denying that nostalgia sells. It
always has but in the midst of a global pandemic, it’s perhaps even more of a
comfort blanket than it ever has been before.
Whether it is artwork or a
release of a new product that nods back to times gone by, people love to
connect to their past, at least for the most part. One only has to take a look
online to find out that something is about to be reinvented and reimagined or
remixed for the 21st Century, and we can’t seem to get enough of these
revivals, remixes, and anniversary editions.
From classic games consoles that
have now been miniaturised and include dozens of original video games that we
would once have played throughout our childhood, right the way through to
folding cell phones that take the concept of the original flip phone and pretty
much destroy it. It’s like everyone is looking to the past, probably in the
hope of fixing the future.
 |
| Tear Down This Wall – another one of my 80s works, but can you spot more than 100 references to the eighties? They’re all there, even if they’re not immediately obvious!! Even world events of the age are referenced in this work. |
According to psychologists,
there’s a lot more going on than us simply hankering after days gone by. Scientists
believe that nostalgia is important in building emotional resilience, looking
back at memories of the past can help you to visualise a more positive future.
Hearing a sound, seeing an image,
or smelling something, or just remembering past times or actively participating
in something that we had fond memories of doing in a bygone era can remind us
of our early life experiences, either good or bad.
These experiences and feelings
trigger the brain’s built-in reward centre which then fires the
neurotransmitters that are involved in pleasure and salience. This produces dopamine
and gives us a pleasurable hit. So, it seems as if we don’t just like nostalgia,
we actively crave it so we can experience what can only be called a high. I
find this remarkable given that nostalgia was once thought to be a disease that
needed to be cured.
More and more of us are
looking for that nostalgia hit too. Since the start of the pandemic there has
been a resurgence in retro video gaming with prices of vintage gaming consoles
and home computers skyrocketing on platforms such as eBay. A 1980s video game
console might have cost around $50 (or around £50 UK) a little more than a year
ago, but since the beginning of the pandemic, those on offer today are being
badged as being either rare or ‘super-rare and having some kind of imaginary retro
tax applied.
It’s not that unusual to see
an old video games console up for sale on an auction website for the buy it now
price of hundreds of dollars when pre-pandemic and certainly a year or so
earlier, the very same system could have been picked up for around a fifth of
the price and before that, for even less, at one time they were almost being
given away.
Sellers are selling the hit,
not just the product and they’re using tactics such as labelling them as
super-rare to give us a sense of urgency and scarcity, it’s the classic
marketing model. Except of course they’re not that rare, or at least most of
them aren’t but that doesn’t stop us buying into the hype when everyone else is
clambering to buy the same thing.
 |
| Art Supplies – one of my recent works and yes, there are nods to the eighties in this piece too! Anyone else remember those tubes of school glue, the steel ruler, safety scissors and the mandatory sewing class! |
Plenty of these allegedly rare
systems still exist in working condition in attics around the world, but what
has happened is that people are seeing the resurgence of retro as a way to sell
that dopamine hit and a childhood memory that we’re all craving for, and
because most folk might not have seen something on the retail shelves for a
while and the assumption is that there are fewer of whatever about.
Some thirty million Atari 2600
video computer systems were sold back in the golden days of video gaming and whether
they’re working or not today, they still exist in big numbers so they’re not
rare, even working ones are just not that rare, these things were way better
built than we build things today. What is rare is for someone to clean out the
attic at the time that you want to buy one. If people stopped falling for this
for a while, I am confident the market would level back off to how it was in
more sensible, precedented times.
Surprisingly, the genuine
vintage technology dealers will mostly be selling this stuff at much more
reasonable prices than individuals will be selling it for, but at a time when
we’re all looking for a safety blanket, the warm fuzzy feeling of positive
childhood memories together with that dopamine hit, well, it’s probably enough
to convince us that we need to place much higher bids than anything is really
worth.
Today, I’m not entirely sure
there is even a specifically defined audience for retro, certainly not in the
same way it could be defined a few years ago. Back then, I would have said that
retro was very much an almost fifty-thing, which might sound stereotypical and
as if it was linked to some kind of mid-life crisis, but retro a few years ago
was a very different market. At that time, the market for anything retro was
tied to a specific subject, event, or time, with a very specific demographic
aligned to each, retro was niche and it was often a small niche.
As we age, our own retro
reality and what we have the fondest memories of ages along with us. What’s
retro or vintage to me isn’t necessarily going to be retro or vintage to
someone older or younger or even the same age, and millennials are buying into retro
and vintage just as much as anyone else.
Retro isn’t age exclusive, and
neither is it exclusive to a specific thing. Retro is on-trend and appeals to a
much wider demographic than it once did and it’s constantly changing, what
wasn’t retro yesterday is suddenly highly collectable today.
Millennials have their own version of retro which you would think would be very firmly rooted in the nineties and
noughties, but millennials are buying retro-inspired creations that depict
everything from the cold war to the 1950s. Retro in the 21st Century,
it seems, has a very broad appeal and I don’t think we can any longer
categorically say that the market for any retro work is definitely more of this
and less of that for any particular demographic. I am constantly surprised by
clients of all age groups who are now buying some of my retro works that would
once only appeal to a very specific group of collectors.
Whilst more defined markets
exist for certain retro subjects, the market isn’t necessarily now limited to
only those looking for a specific subject. Retro is a style that people can buy
into regardless of the subject matter, and people do seem to be buying into
eras as much as anything that went on or was available within them. If you have
a fifties home décor theme going on, then anything that ties into that fifty’s
era is fair game to add some authenticity to the décor.
What it perhaps comes down to for
an artist wanting to produce retro-inspired works is whether the style you are
creating is a nod to the past with some artistic licence or an authentic
recreation that might not fit quite so well with modern décor, something a
little more detailed, a little more authentic, less of a nod to the past, more
very much just like the past.
If I had to break the
demographics down in such a granular way, those might be the two most distinct
areas of retro I would say could be more defined and be more applicable to
specific demographics. I think today, you’re either creating authentic or
decorative retro and you might or might not focus on a specific subject, what
you will be more focussed on is that the work fits with a particular era and
you will inevitably find a style and an era that suits your ability as an
artist.
I think what we can say about
retro is that, if you were ever looking for a niche that appeals to the
broadest section of society, you essentially have two choices. Food which we
buy to survive or nostalgia that we buy to remember, and sometimes even those two
things are linked.
Whilst there is plenty of
material in the genre of retro that can keep an artist in work forever, retro
can be an incredibly challenging artistic genre to pull off. What we tend to
see with a lot of retro work today is a nod to a period in time that relies on
artistic licence rather than any kind of authentic presentation, but the
description of the work might be nuanced towards the wrong demographic and it
fails to gain traction in any market. In short, whilst it is a broad market,
you can still miss the mark when it comes to marketing the work.
Retro-inspired along with
artistic licence is a trend, it’s faux, mainly decorative, and perhaps doesn’t
provide the viewer with the same kind of dopamine hit in the way that something
more authentic would, but it is the nod to the past that a specific retro
viewer is looking for and it very much has a market. For me, I think this falls
into a category of functional art, it generally has a very specific purpose,
although not always.
That kind of decorative, faux
retro has a place, but for an artist looking to create authentic retro pieces
that are perhaps better described as vintage, it’s important to realise that those
who are genuinely looking to reconnect with the past are more likely to be sticklers
for detail, they want authenticity, they want the work to give them a snapshot
of the past that they can connect with and they will be looking for that
dopamine hit that will scratch their itch for nostalgia.
Having said that, it is
possible to add some artistic licence to more historically accurate pieces but,
in this instance, the trigger of nostalgia will be more reliant on the story
the work tells. A good retro artist is also a storyteller, and unfortunately,
not every artist can tell a story which is why retro can be challenging to pull
off convincingly.
Retro can be a confusing genre
to work in. Whilst some people want a retro-inspired piece that fits in with
modern surroundings, other people look for much more authenticity. It can be
challenging for an artist to create retro work if they aren’t specific enough
about what they want to create, the work risks becoming either nor. Either
they’re creating a piece that nods back to a period in time, or they’re
producing an authentic retro experience filled with authenticity and I think
those styles of retro artworks are two very different things that can sometimes
be confused.
I think it stems from the
interchangeability of the terms vintage and retro. Retro is really something
that is new that imitates something from the past, it’s something that can have
much more in the way of artistic licence applied to it. Vintage on the other
hand is something old and original, and where this gets recreated, the devil, as
they say, is really in the detail because it is much more of a recreation of
original. It’s also a matter of timing, retro can describe anything from twenty
years or more ago but that’s subjective, vintage is older and can also be
described as antique depending on just how old it is.
Getting the terminology
correct is really important, creating a vintage-inspired work and labelling it
as retro will miss the market for vintage, equally, labelling a work as vintage
but giving it a retro-inspired makeover is something that you could actually
create, but there is yet another market that exists for that particular style
of work.
There is also a vibrant fine
art market for scenes of the past or where the work tells a compelling story
that triggers a memory within the viewer. Retro is acutely more diverse than
many other artistic subjects in the direction that the artist can take it, but
you do need to be specific about what you have created and I think there is a
difference between painting history and painting retro.
As confusing as it seems, I’m
possibly oversimplifying things a little, there are way more nuances between
the terms vintage and retro and it is very much down to individual
interpretation as much as anything else especially when it comes to what gets
classed as being retro, vintage, or antique. Ask some people and vintage
should only ever be used to describe the age of wine which stems from the
French word Vendage, meaning ‘the grapes picked during a season’.
I think it’s all about the
timing. if you are trying to recreate a particular look or feel, it’s really
important that you get the language that describes and identifies the piece
correct, but it’s also critical if you are aiming to give something a
genuinely authentic aesthetic, that you also carry out some research and
absolutely nail the detail so that you’re creating what would have been present
at, and of the time.
 |
| Strictly not 8-bit, this image is created using 32 x 32 pixels so would have been used in 16 bit and later, 32-bit systems. Grab some graph paper, spilt it into 8×8 or 16×16 grids and then tell a story within the grid. It’s a great way to sharpen your storytelling and your creativity! It’s lots of fun too! |
My own experience of creating
‘retro’ stems back to the eighties, except back then it wasn’t so much retro,
it really was cutting edge. I had a small modicum of success in creating video
game art, or more specifically, the sprites that would be used as characters in
video games, although I had slightly less success with a game I produced, but
which did get published. I was producing digital art way before even Warhol
made it trendy, the difference is that I wasn’t anywhere near as good at
marketing, nothing changes, I guess!
Surprisingly, my work in this
area has never stopped. Whilst the way I produce digital art is very different
today, I’m still serving a market of retro game fans with arcade cabinet art
and covers for homebrew games on the original home computers, rather than the
immensely detailed environment and concept art that you might find in modern
games that create the look and feel of an entire world which tend to be created
by teams of dozens of artists.
As for those chunky eight by
eight pixelated sprites, I still get asked to create them, usually as posters to
hang in retro-inspired spaces and not just in stereotypical man-caves. I get
commissions from female gamers and retro fans too, and occasionally I also get
commissions from homebrew coders who just don’t have the time to produce
character sets or when they need cover art for their latest game that runs on
original hardware. For some works, I still utilise the original hardware to
create the images which makes me sound like a technology hoarder and I think
it’s fair to say I am. When my vintage home computers are all buzzing away it
can feel like walking into one of those independent high street computer
retailers in 1982.
I’m often more than happy to
take those kinds of commissions on, even out of love sometimes. First, I’m a
retro gamer, second, I’m still living in the eighties, and because it’s
important to protect the legacy of the golden age of home computing and video
games. We should never forget just how vital the likes of Atari were to modern-day computing, not just gaming. The internet wouldn’t be anything like the same
as it is today had it have not been for the likes of Atari and Commodore
bringing this technology into the home.
Selecting an era to base your
retro-inspired ideas on might be down to the artistic style you feel more
comfortable with creating than your passion for any particular era. If we take
a look back through the decades since the fifties, every one of them could
easily be defined by very specific and very different styles.
The rounded corners of kitchen
appliances in the fifties, the unexpected colour combinations of the sixties
with an almost futuristic feel to both architecture and furniture. That sixties
and seventies architecture that had so much utility seems to be coming back
post-pandemic with many organisations now focussing on the environmental
benefits of refurbishment rather than rebuild, and the more recent migration
away from open office spaces and hot desks which are now being seen as harbours
of infection. Finally, we might get our own offices back but this time with a
soap dispenser hung next to the door.
Who could forget the seventies
and the groovy bright colours which always seemed to be accented with a mustard
hue? The eighties, with its shoulder pads and neon-lit shopping malls, always
take me back to my childhood, whereas the nineties, at least for me, was
defined by knotted pine and the purple walls found in the TV show Friends.
I find that getting an
authentic sixties vibe down on canvas is especially challenging but give me a
project that’s based on the eighties and I am well and truly in my comfort zone
as you can probably guess. Despite being born right at the very end of the sixties,
my passion for the eighties is, I think it’s fair to say, bordering on the
almost obsessive. Perhaps stemming from both fond memories of the decade and a
couple of years working on almost nothing but Cold War inspired artworks and
props for period theatrical plays and of course, creating those images that
would jump around in video games, the eighties for me were great days.
 |
| Getting the fonts, papers, and typography correct is just so important when working on props, here’s an earlier selection. Not sure which, if any, of these ever got used, but I do remember getting paper cuts from cutting out the tickets. Lots of research and photo references involved! |
If you are lucky enough to be
able to apply your artistic style to your favourite era, that really helps with
recreating the authentic vibe that collectors and buyers yearn for, but I don’t
think it’s necessarily easy to force a particular artistic style if you’re not
already comfortable in creating it. I think that goes with any artistic
endeavour, you have to be comfortable first and then develop from there.
When creating a retro or vintage-inspired artwork from whatever era, there are a few things that are worth
considering that will add more of an authentic touch to your work.
Textures…
Whilst every era can be
identified by its design style, every era also had its own texture. The texture becomes really important when you are producing any kind of historically based
reference. The small rip or tear or the crumpled page can age a design so that
it becomes more authentic, but it can also make a piece feel less mass-produced.
One of the most versatile
techniques used in digital art lends itself perfectly to creating retro
inspired textures. The use of texture images laid down as overlays and then
blended into the background using the overlay tool, can mean that you can even
age a digitally created work rather than having to rely on finding the right
physical medium to print or produce the work on.
 |
| Add a texture image above the image you need to create the effect on, size it, or use the clipping mask to only apply it to the layer directly beneath, and then go to the transparency menu and select overlay or one of the other blending effects. |
 |
| A flat image will now have texture. You can also build up textures by repeating the process and merging the layers in between. It takes a little practice but Procreate on the iPad Pro makes it very easy. Similar results can be achieved in Photoshop too. |
Shading, noise, and slightly
blurred backgrounds can be used to great effect to create some beautiful
textures, add depth and provide that aged shade look that many retro and
vintage works have. Adding a border can make a modern creation appear aged, but
there is one technique that is often never applied to a retro or vintage work,
and that is the technique of keeping things simple.
Choose any decade pre-the
noughties, and you will find that images tend to be much simpler than they are
today. The tools to create pseudo-3D effects didn’t really exist and when they
did, they were inaccessible to all but the biggest corporations who could
afford that kind of technology.
If you are looking to recreate
authenticity in a work, that’s kind of an important detail to remember and it’s
also refreshing to have to limit your toolset to roughly what would have been
available to create the work at the time, even if you are creating the work
digitally. Lately, I have been noticing more and more of my artist friends
looking towards techniques such as silk screen printing and finally finding a
use for those skills we learned in school. Anyone remember mixing those powder
poster paints and where they even safe?
When you are working with both
vintage and retro-inspired works, typography plays a key role. Adding a modern
font to a period piece will completely destroy the vibe of the time you are
aiming to recreate. Here’s a quick run down to give you an idea around the time
period that is generally tied into fonts.
1900s…
Morris Fueller Benton’s News
Gothic is a sans serif font that can also be found in the opening text
scroll of Star Wars. Anything from around 1910 might though be better suited to
Johnston, which is classified as a humanist san-serif font.
1920 – another humanist
sans-serif font called Gill Sans could be used, at least until we
get to the 1930s when the Times New Roman style would be found
in newspapers. Text similar in style to the Fairfield (serif)
font would have been popular in film during the 1940s, but when we get to the
50s, the san-serif Univers would have a much more authentic feel.
The 1960s as we head towards
the era of the Space Race would be more attuned to using something like the
geometric sans-serif, Eurostile but as we travel in time to the
70s, then something like ITC Avant Garde would be reminiscent of
the typography of the period.
If you need something
different from the seventies, there is plenty of choice with many styles
spilling over into the eighties. Mouse, Bauhaus Geomet, (other
Bauhaus fonts were typical of the time too), Helvetica, Menhir, and Futura,
could be used for 70s inspired works, but an Aki Lines
style was often found in anything related to music during that particular
decade and it is now reappearing in more recent titles.
The eighties were a real mixed
bag of typography, Avenir is perhaps one font that could be used
for most things of the age, but neon effects were really coming into their own
by this point. In the 90s, particularly if you are recreating signage, then Meta,
another humanist sans-serif font is useful to have in your library. The eighties also dominated popular culture
and video game inspired fonts such as Pac Font, Arcade
Classic, Sabo, VCR OSD, and Bayshore which can all give your work a
much more authentic feel.
Retrofuturism which we
briefly touched on in my last article became really popular again in the
eighties, Stargaze and Paralines are two beautiful
fonts that deserve to be seen in any retro-futuristic work from that era. As I suggested last time, take a look at
Walt Disney World’s Tomorrowland as a shining example of retro-futurism, it’s
an essential field trip for any retro-futuristic artist and I still want to
become a Disney Imagineer when I grow up. You can also check it out on YouTube.
Dope, Spot, Hanover, Vogue,
Samson, were popular in the 1990s, and 1995 saw the
introduction of my all-time-least favourite font, Comic Sans. Some
love it, I’m afraid I’m not one of them, and it was designed for a specific
reason that isn’t a reason to still use it today. A program called Microsoft
Bob used speech bubbles to communicate with young computer users, but it also
used Times New Roman, which designer Vincent Connare thought
wasn’t accessible, so he came up with Comic Sans instead.
Although Comic Sans wasn’t
ready in time for the release of Microsoft’s Bob, it instead became the font of
Microsoft Publisher, appeared as a font in Windows 95 and was seen as a font
that wasn’t confrontational so was used in company branding, a little too
often. I recently found some business cards picked up from a trade show from a
decade ago and nine of the ten had used Comic Sans. Even back then, this really
wasn’t a good design choice that I could get behind.
Today, as a font, it’s
divisive, it probably has a place, but I have no idea where that place might be,
yet I know a few people who love it and continue to use it. Honestly, not a fan
but it has got people talking about fonts I guess which is remarkable in itself
because a few years ago I would never have put money on anyone ever having a
conversation about fonts outside of a design agency. I digress, let’s get back
to it.
Gotham style
typography became popular in the 2000s, and nothing really changed until the
end of the decade when Open Sans style typography became
more prevalent.
A font choice, particularly
when it is being used in a retro-inspired design, can make, or break not just
the artwork, but the entire era the work represents. I don’t think I could ever
imagine a font such as Comic Sans being used on a 60s album cover from Jimi
Hendrix or David Bowie, it just wouldn’t capture the era let alone the music
and it certainly wouldn’t match the period. So just as you do with texture, you
really do have to research the fonts of the period if you intend to use fonts
at all.
One piece of font-astic
advice, and please forgive the pun because it was intended because I just came
up with that and it made me laugh, is that you should never skimp on font
licencing. Using professional fonts rather than relying on utilising the ‘almost
but not quite’ era-correct fonts that can be found in free font libraries, is
worth the additional expense. It sometimes feels like everyone uses open-source
fonts that tend to lead to works either losing their historical accuracy or
works that can begin to appear samey. The right font will elevate the work
above every other piece that uses those more generic variants and it’s
generally a wise investment even if it is a little more expensive. The world is
full of font-snobs who can spot the difference between a free font and
something that costs a little money. Don’t skimp on these things, they’re important!
If fonts can elevate a piece,
they still can’t quite match the power that using the correct colour pallet can
bring to a retro-inspired creation. A colour pallet alone can conjure up
memories of certain times. The eighties were perhaps renowned for bright pinks
and purples and metallic gradients, the seventies were garish but applying the
correct and historically most accurate colour palette to any retro creation can
be the difference between a viewer being transported back to an era or walking
right on past the work.
 |
| 80s Purple Pallet |
 |
| Silver 80s Pallet |
 |
| 80s Blues Colour Pallet |
 |
| 80s Green Colour Pallet |
Again, this really comes down
to carrying out some research, exploring the colour pallets of the time and
then experimenting. One of the things I do frequently with some of my digital
work once I have completed it, is to take the original files and then recolour
them with different pallets. The muted 50s inspired artwork recoloured to
convey the neon eighties can look like two entirely different creations which
can be quite the mind-bender at times producing some really interesting and
creative effects.
I’m one of those kinds of
people who have to research everything, but the amount of research I do is
often determined by the passion I have for the subject. I might spend a couple
of hours with my head in a book or glued to a screen but give me a subject I
can become super-enthused about and the research can last for weeks, months,
and sometimes even years.
My passion for digital art
started in 1981, although arguably, it might have been 1980 which is officially
when I took my first digital commission for some scrolling text to appear on a
display screen, in part, because I was a bedroom coder, read geek, and in part
because I was cheap enough to hire, I would only need to cover the cost of a
new computer game on a cassette tape and have enough change for some pick ‘n’
mix sweets. My trip down the rabbit hole of researching digital art still
continues to this day.
Retro is a broad subject, and
I’m using the term retro quite loosely here to describe vintage and every other
variation. Depending on what retro route you decide to follow will determine
where you will find the best research resources. But, researching retro isn’t
just about scouring websites or flicking through magazines and books from the
past, the best research will come directly from those who experienced the era
you are following, so there’s ample opportunity for face-to-face discussion
with this subject.
One pointer I think is
important to mention is that when you do research retro, it’s probably a better
idea to avoid directly researching retro-inspired artworks. There will be too
many influences from the artists who created the work and often, rather than
authenticity, you will start to see the work through the lens of a particular
artist and that in itself can be quite influential in what you go on to create.
We become influenced by what we’re exposed to, so my advice is to go straight back
to the original source, do your own research, and be inspired by original
rather than someone else’s interpretation of original.
With a subject that looks back
to the past, it should be your own interpretation or your own research that is
depicted on canvas, otherwise, you run the risk of producing artwork that feels
very samey. The retro-inspired artwork market is already filled with art that
is already just like that and whilst nostalgia sells, not every piece of retro
inspired work will and less so when much of it looks so similar.
Once you have a subject in
mind, there are plenty of resources around, and there are plenty of vibrant
communities too. Podcasts exist for every subject under the sun these days, but
you might want to also check out older web-based forums, even those that remain
online but are no longer active. There are still some enthusiastic communities
for Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, and later the Garbage Pail Kids, and some really
bizarre subjects that no one would have thought would still have an active
community in the 21st Century, yet they do. Pick any of your
favourite toys from your childhood and I can almost guarantee that you will
find a community of fans still talking about it.
One of my go-to resources is
the Way Back Machine which
lets you take a look back at web pages just as they looked at the specific time
they were captured. Many were captured years ago, almost at the start of the
internet as we recognise it today, and there are abandoned pages and websites aplenty, even when the website owners have long given up on their one time
hopes and dreams for web-based stardom. It’s a digital archaeologists dream and
it allows you to really explore retro in ways that books or a general scour of
the internet just cannot match.
I would think you can safely
assume that by now, every subject has a webpage, or did at one time have a
webpage, because more than 552 billion pages exist on the site. It is another
deep, deep, rabbit hole and you do need to be prepared to spend some not
insignificant time getting a taste of what authentic really looked like back in
the day.
In my previous article, I gave
a shout out to a few retro video games podcasts, and if vintage and retro
gaming is something that you might feel inclined to stretch towards, a word of
advice from someone who has been involved with retro gaming since 70s and 80s
gaming was cutting edge, is to absolutely do the best research that you can.
Retro gamers are an
unforgiving bunch and can be harsher than any professional art critic over the
minutest of details. I know this because not only am I a retro and vintage
gamer with a history of having a little involvement in the industry during the
early days, I’m also obsessive about detail, just like many retro games
collectors are. It’s no different to any historic subject that gets depicted in
art, wherever fans exist, there will be an element of hardcore fans who really
do expect a high level of historical accuracy.
The Cultural Importance of
Video Games in Art…
Video games might not be a
subject that interests you, perhaps you might pick up your phone or tablet from
time to time and have a casual play on something, but if you are interested in
art, video game art isn’t something that only appears as bits and pixels in the
actual game, it has a huge following and it’s highly collectable.
Video game art is an entire
movement that is widely ignored outside of gaming and retro communities, but it
is an essential piece of the jigsaw in art education because it has major
crossovers with marketing and design. It is essentially an entire art education
in itself so even if you have no personal truck with games, the art of video
games is one that will both enrich and inform your current level of art understanding regardless of the artistic style that you follow.
It should absolutely be a staple in any art curriculum because it is a one-stop-shop of everything art. Forget the subject matter, this is how the art business works when it comes to product promotion and design.
In video games themselves there
is an element of in-game art, entire worlds are beautifully created using both
traditional and digital artists skills and when we look at the retro games’
scene more broadly, an entirely new art market springs up that is both
fascinating and a source of constant surprise even to this day.
The research for older video
games is fascinating from all sorts of perspectives. An enthusiastic and
vibrant art market exists for the artwork that appeared on arcade cabinets and cabinet
marquees back in the early to mid-eighties, and from the box art and
advertising that went along with any new home computer and video console releases.
Think back to the days of
Atari, Intellivision and Coleco, and way before Nintendo and Sega, and what you
will find is a fascinating glimpse into an often-forgotten art world, or at
least forgotten in a mainstream sense but some of the artists creating the
images at the time went on to do great work and today their original works are
highly collectable and eye wateringly expensive to buy.
 |
| Atari video game box art, just like the arcade game cabinets had to pull in a crowd of eager paying players. The art had to tell a story and the artists were masters of their craft. Image used as a reference, all rights belong to the rights holder and artists. |
Artists such as John Enright,
Susan Jaekel, Cliff Spohn, and George Opperman were the very artists that got
me into art in the first place, as did the work of fantasy artist Oliver Frey,
a little later. Ollie is a Brit who created the art for home computer magazines.
Spohn, Opperman, and Jaekel were the artists who also designed those wonderful
boxes that Atari games would be packaged in and the side art that appeared on
arcade cabinets which would either be vinyl or hand-painted usually with
stencils.
Those images told stories that
the games themselves certainly couldn’t convey with their limited blocky
graphics. In hindsight, they were often masterpieces of storytelling which we
can now learn from even if the subject matter doesn’t appeal to you.
Not only did their work have
to convey a story, but it also had to appeal to a broad swathe of the public. Listen to
those who were around at the time and they will tell you that it was the artwork
that supported the games that would convert the nation’s youth into gamers, one
quarter at a time. It was a strategy to utilise the artwork to attract paying
players and it succeeded. We exchanged money for games based on how excited we
were by the art on the cover or on the side of the arcade cabinet, everything
really was about how appealing the design could be made.
Let that sink in for a moment
because as a ten-year-old, that is exactly what got me excited about art and I
would think that for a lot of ten-year-olds of the time, visiting the arcades
and seeing the artwork was one of the few times beyond the school trip to an
art gallery that kids would be exposed to artwork, and they appreciated it. I
remember having conversations with school friends about colour, and how crisp
the images were on specific cabinets, not fully understanding that this was
down to the printing process. Ten-year-olds were having conversations about
art, I think we might have lost that.
 |
| A portrait recreated using the Commodore Amiga A500 and Delux Paint. Notice the scan lines of the CRT monitor and the more vibrant glow than you would get from a modern LCD or OLED display. It will look much better on a CRT display than it does here even though that will not be in anything like HD resolution. |
No publisher, or at least very
few were able to create screenshots of the games on the packaging and when they
did it was almost always from a better system, so it was always down to the
artwork to bring the players closer to the arcade game or to the home version. It
was the artwork that told the story and filled in the gaps that the graphics
and even the gameplay couldn’t.
That art was magnetic, it had
to attract a buyer from a distance, and it did, it was bold, and there was a
certain aesthetic about it that still feels just as on-point today. The games
could never sell the games in the way that the artwork did, art managed to
create an entire global industry from what people had initially said was just
one of those trends that will pass.
There is significant cultural importance
in covering this subject, lots more people from the industry of the time should
be coming back and writing about it, especially as the publishers of the games
from the late 70s and right the way through to the noughties, were never very
good at archiving or documenting their work. Instead, it is often left to the
likes of retro collectors and enthusiasts to document what is really an
important industry and many of those who were involved at the time are edging
ever closer to no longer being around.
 |
| Work in progress on a working Commodore 64 vintage computer system. Recreating a beach scene, this is coded using BASIC, Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. In itself, a long lost art, there aren’t many of us BASIC programmers left! |
Culturally, the video games
industry has been responsible for so much development in the way of computing
and gaming. There will, I hope, be a time when eighties home computers and the
golden age of video games will be taught alongside other subjects of historical
importance, but the art should be revered given the task that it achieved.
It’s similar to other retro
subjects. Marketing had to be exactly on-point for any product to reach an
audience, there was no internet, everything relied on print media, TV, and word
of mouth or the product packaging. If the product didn’t have that
all-important ‘I need it’ factor, the product wouldn’t find its market. The art
hooked us, it’s what sold the product.
When it comes to recreating
authenticity, we might be well served to look towards the more nefarious characters
who have been involved with the art industry or at least have been involved in
the shadows of the art industry. The dark side of the art world, one of
fakes and forgeries isn’t just fascinating in a kind of intriguing way, it is
an area that we can learn from when it comes to recreating authenticity.
Whilst I would never condone
anyone forging a painting, I’m not so certain we can just cast aside the
obvious skill that some of these master forgers have. You simply cannot buy
authenticity, but you can sure as nails fake it.
I would like to say that I am
savvy enough to be able to spot a fake at fifty paces, except I’m not, and
neither are many of the major galleries around the world who either knowingly
have forgeries within their collections or who are totally in the dark about
the origins of some of their assets. I dare say that those who do know are more
likely to keep their lips well and truly sealed, not only would it be
embarrassing for a major gallery to say they have it wrong, but it would also
shoot a hole right through the fine art market, just as it has done whenever
forgeries have been exposed.
I have seen forgeries up
close, right next to originals and if I had to rely only on the naked eye, I
would wager a bet that even with a 50/50 probability of spotting the fake, most
people would choose the forgery as the original. The authenticity of a forgery
is something of a learnable skill, how well you perform that skill comes down
to experience and how well the provenance is forged to go with it and how much
of a convincing storyteller, the seller is.
What we can take away from the
criminally-minded masters of the present day who recreate the old masters of
the past is some of the techniques employed to age works and add details that
the naked eye will be drawn to. Extremely useful if we’re considering a career
move into retro and vintage art where authenticity is key but be mindful that
doing anything even remotely slightly outside of legal isn’t something that I
would recommend you do, even in the name of art.
 |
| Flaking paint on the doors, signage, screws, stone detail and weeds, just some of the extra detail I always tend to put into works, whether it is needed or not! This is my latest creation, New Game Day, a massive nod to summer in the 80s. |
Even though much of my work
today is digitally created, that hasn’t always been the case and right now I
can literally touch three canvases I’m working on as I keep my traditional
skills honed and the commissions flowing. In short, if you are going down the
retro rabbit hole then knowing what materials were used in original pieces is
vital information to have if you are looking to recreate authenticity if it is
to be believable.
If you are looking to recreate
something pre-nineteenth century then it’s worth knowing that it wasn’t until
the 19th Century that industrial manufacturers began to produce
commercial studio-grade oil paints. It wasn’t until 1953 that acrylic paint
would be used and the very first of these were actually wall paints rather than
artist paints.
Artists would need to mix
their own paints prior to this, and it wasn’t inexpensive to do this even then.
Nothing ever changes with art supplies, does it? It wasn’t so much that the
paint itself was expensive to produce but the pigments used in the paints often
had to be imported. Some artists would use a siccative or extenders to make the
paint go further, and they are often used today, mainly in the form of barium
sulphate and alumina hydrate because neither of which have too much effect on
the tint.
Forgers realise this and will
go to painstaking lengths to recreate an almost exact pigment, but for
authentic vintage recreations you can mostly and thankfully take the less
onerous route of using modern commercial studio-grade paints, although if you
do need a little more authenticity, it might be worth experimenting with mixing
or adding in an extender.
When selecting the support, be
it paper, canvas, wood, or whatever medium of the period, there are techniques
you can apply to give the support an aged look. When I create artwork props or
documents, one of the things I always make sure I have to hand is some aged
paper stock.
There are various ways of
ageing, at one time I would leave paper out in a sunlit area so that it became
naturally yellowed from UV light, the issue with that is that once this process
begins to happen, it is a process that then continues to degrade the medium and
there’s little if anything that can be done to prevent it.
Expert forgers will look for
canvases and papers of a similar age may be produced in a similar region to the
canvas that the work originally appeared on and there is plenty of evidence to
suggest that master forgers would buy quite expensive artworks only to remove
the original paint and then recreate the old master on the now fresh but
appropriately aged and historically accurate canvas. There’s even some
anecdotal evidence to suggest that some forgers have done this and
inadvertently removed a painting that had a much higher monetary value then the
work they were about to forge.
Depending on the exact level
of historical accuracy though, a seventies canvas print that probably will
never have any aesthetic, collectable or financial appeal might be the way to
create something even more authentic, but there are easier ways to age a canvas
that will suffice for most retro or vintage-inspired works unless you have a
local thrift store, in which case looking out for vintage frames and supports
is something that is definitely worth considering.
Ageing a modern canvas can be
done with diluted bleach by applying it to the back of the panel to give it the
brittle feeling that you would get when you touch an authentically aged work. If
you then add a mixture of umber and paint thinner together with the liquid from
soaked coffee grinds after straining them through a sieve, and then rub into
the canvas in circular motions, the ageing effect is quite convincing. I have
seen this done with soil and even sand which also provides some natural abrasion.
On the front of the canvas, a 75/25
mixture of thinner together with a mix of umber will provide a nice, antiquated
effect and if you rub either walnut oil or the same mix that you applied on the
back of the canvas into any exposed wood, the finished piece will be completely
transformed into something that just feels really old and fragile but is still
much less fragile than the original might be.
Remember though, when you are
recreating authentic vintage or retro pieces, whilst the purist collectors of
vintage will be sticklers for detail, there’s still a great deal of artistic
licence that you can get away with. You’re not in the business of forging
artwork, your job is to provide the smoke and mirrors that trigger the
nostalgia hit the viewer is looking for. The trick is in making the viewer
believe what they are seeing, and arguably, that’s exactly what art forgers do
too!
Some vintage work really does
need to have a stressed effect for it to be convincing. Sandpaper to gently scratch
paint away from wood or whatever medium the work is created on is a nice way to
provide a subtle stress effect, and you can round the corners of works which is
something that would naturally occur to artwork over time.
If you need to create cracks
in the paint, you can either wait for fifty years or so, more in the case of
most modern paints or you could just use Elmer’s Glue with a thin layer for
hairline cracks and a thicker layer for larger and deeper cracks. If you then
apply a top coat of flat latex paint in a different colour over the glue and
then cure it with gentle heat, it is an inexpensive way to produce a
believable cracked paint effect.
Alternatively, you could opt
for a crackle medium, but these can work out to be quite expensive and if you
are anything like me whenever you visit the art supply store, you might decide
to spend the GDP of a major country on a range of all of the professional
mediums that are specifically designed to apply vintage or stressed effects.
 |
| The Wayback Machine at Archive.org is a rabbit hole that you might never leave! An outstanding source of discovering retro! |
For antique glazed effects, I
tend to steer away from ready mixed-effects mediums and instead mix raw umber,
burnt sienna, and a dark brown together. You might want to experiment with your
own ratios for this, but the effect can be much better controlled than you would
be able to achieve with a pre-mixed medium and you can always add thinner to
the mix if you want something more transparent. I tend to use this on projects
that involve ceramics, but it works great on furniture and canvases too and it
can really elevate the work.
On frames, it’s not uncommon
to see tiny woodworm holes on original pieces, and whilst it’s not something
that is completely necessary if you are using an older frame such as those you
can pick up for next to nothing in a thrift store, driving in a small nail and
removing it produces a similar effect. I then dip the nail into a slightly
darker than the frame paint just to add a little depth, and this has the added
benefit of protecting any exposed wood so that ironically, it’s less likely to
become a harbour for real woodworms.
Creating fly specks, the enemy
of many a fine art collector is easy enough to recreate using paint flicks, but
it is much better when this is done with thicker paint to give the flicks a more
of a raised texture.
One of my long-running side
hustles has been in creating props for theatre, tv and film, usually creating
documents but occasionally creating the random abstract that hangs in a lobby
for around half a second of screen time and this has taught me more than a few
short cuts and a few not quite so short cuts, to create special effects over
the years.
It has had a knock-on effect
in influencing some of my artwork too. I absolutely love to create deep levels
of detail that aren’t always immediately obvious to the viewer, it’s the kind
of it’s there if you look detail and it can be another one of those things
where I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse, some of the detail in my
works can add hours to the time spent creating it.
If you can master a few
techniques that can give the appearance of ageing that won’t dramatically add
to the overall time needed to create the work, I think the detail is worth
adding. If it takes hours and hours, you do have to consider whether it is
worth doing, or whether you can recreate what you are looking to do in a
simpler way that just provides an indication that the detail is there. My own
problem is that I rarely if ever take the shortest route!
One piece of advice I would
give to any artist considering working in retro and vintage works is to not
limit themselves to digital creations. If you work only in digital you will
limit what you can do with some subjects, and it’s only possible to produce an
impression of authenticity as opposed to physical authenticity which allows
collectors to hold something in their hand that then takes them back on a
nostalgia trip. Texture, feel, and even weight, can reinforce the
believability, with digital, it can be slightly more limiting.
Having said that, there’s
still lots, and I really do mean, lots, of possibilities for digital artists to
work in the retro and vintage space, and as we have covered here today, it is
an artistic genre that stretches way beyond a fifties advertising sign or the
Rubik Cube. So how far does it stretch? Let’s take a look at just a few
examples.
Broadside Posters were
perhaps the earliest forms of posters and they were used to bring attention to
public decrees and notifications from the government. They were produced in
large quantities, also known as ephemera, and they usually had short sentences
to convey whatever message. Think of these as the earliest tweets, except they
would be printed using a woodcut printing process. No intricate drawing would
appear on these as the printing process was very limited.
Pixel Art which
I have covered here today and in the past on this website is perhaps more
stereotypically retro today, but pixel art is a bit of an art form in itself
and one that is quite challenging, and not made any easier by modern design
software. The real art is in coming up with something that would represent a
picture in around 64 blocks of colour.
8-Bit retro art usually refers
to the time when 8-bit processors would be able to use 8×8 pixel blocks to
create a character.
 |
| Another work in progress using an Atari ST 16-bit computer to recreate the box art of Space Invaders on the VCS 2600. Image courtesy of rights holder and used to demonstrate the power of the STs graphics. The Amiga was much better! |
Not to be confused with
voxels, which represents a character in a 3D space, think Minecraft, although
technically, Minecraft uses polygons that pretend to be voxels if we’re getting
geeky, or Texel which is an image representing the smallest unit of texture
that may be repeated to tile an area. Voxels are extremely popular, particularly
in advertising.
Lithography many
vintage posters used the process of lithography, drawing the design onto a
stone or metal plate which was usually made from either zinc or aluminium
affixed with a chemical process with the design drawn using a lithographic
crayon or ink. There is a great walkthrough of the process at The Met Museum
website which you can find here.
Poster Art was
popular between the 1880s and 1960s and by the 1870s, the streets of Paris
would be lined with beautiful posters advertising some of the local bars and
clubs. The movement landed in the US and Europe eventually where it became the
primary means of communication. Early poster art was heavily influenced by Art
Nouveau styles and later Art Deco.
Propaganda Posters have
been used by governments over and over, even to this day, you can see this style
of poster being used in countries such as North Korea. Whilst we might not
agree with the subject matter, there still remains a nod to the Cold War years
in many of the works that do find their way out of the country.
World War II and post-war
posters are incredibly popular for collectors, and these began to really
influence the travel industry in the post-war years. I remember seeing some
great posters to advertise the once-great airlines such as Pan Am, and there
are some outstanding examples of vintage advertising posters. However, you also
need to be mindful of any copyright issues.
Signage is
always popular, regular readers will know that my pub and restaurant
chalkboard signs have been something that has proven to be popular for a
number of years, particularly in the B2B leisure and hospitality market.
Vintage and retro signage is
also something that performs well within the retro home décor market. Vintage
and retro kitchen signs advertising things like cream teas, coffee, or home
baking and printed on wood or metal have been incredibly popular for years.
However, many of them do have a kind of mass-produced feel so there could very
well be a niche for something much more authentic. It’s likely that you will
see some of these coming out of my own studio very soon, my daughter is in the
process of opening a high-end bakery that also happens to sell accessories for
the kitchen! Now I get to be the voluntary webmaster, courier, business
analyst, and in-house artist and I’m still accepting computer games as payment
all these years on!
Is retro for you?
Whether you are creating
pixelated 8-bit art or recreating an antique, retro and vintage design is
certainly, an artistic adventure that is as broad as it is long. There is so
much scope for an artist to explore and it is a style of work that can be
applied to almost any subject.
As a vintage or retro artist
you don’t necessarily have to be limited to a single subject, the aged theme
will often be enough to tie a body of work together. It all comes down to where
you place your art for viewing or sale and the always important marketing, but
I don’t think there is a style of art that is quite as flexible or more
forgiving for an artist to work with.
Is it a genre that is worth
exploring? If you enjoy history or recreating the past it can certainly be a
pleasurable pursuit that feels much less formal than other artistic genres. It
can also be challenging, particularly if you want to recreate vintage pieces
that will require some often insane amounts of research to be carried out. If
you are an artist who prefers to follow a genre that’s a little more straight
forward where you are creating a single body of work with a more linear subject,
retro and vintage might be more of a challenge and whilst many might initially
think it’s easy, they quickly find out that it’s not.
The other caveat is that
whilst there are broader markets for vintage and retro work, in that you can
often justify swapping the subject matter whilst retaining an overall theme,
I’m not convinced that any retro and vintage work will necessarily be seen in
the same light as more traditional artworks in terms of value. It also tends to
be placed in different kinds of retailers or galleries. It does tend to do well
in particularly touristy type areas, but it can also be a very crowded market.
My own experience is that this
genre has historically for me, been very much an aside from my usual style of
work, but having done this for so long my client base is relatively healthy
especially for 8-bit art. That may be in part because there just aren’t the
numbers of artists working in a specific 8-bit niche, so I think that in some
cases, it could turn into more of a labour of love unless you can gain a
foothold in a particular vintage or retro niche and then maybe branch out from
there.
As with any art market, there
will always be a market for everything, as I have said many times before, even
bad art sells with the right marketing. But here’s the real rub, if you think
there will be a ready-made buyer base eager to purchase retro and vintage style
work, things aren’t quite so simple. You still have the marketing work to do
just as you would with any subject, medium or genre, but the base for this work
is broad and it might very well be a nice aside from, collection of work.
It is a busy market, there’s a
heap of retro and vintage work already out there, but I think there is a lot of
replication. I can’t even count up the number of times I have seen a slight
twist on a twist of a theme, and some of the work does seem to be thrown
together without too much of an insight into the past.
There are some phenomenal
retro and vintage artists out there who tend to get overshadowed by a lot of
templated vintage and retro art that isn’t in any way created with authenticity
front and centre. What I mean by this is that this is the style of art that can
usually be found in the imported print market with localisations applied to it.
If you take vintage signage as
an example, there is a lot of it that is the same but it will be printed with different
place names to meet some local market. For me, this is really souvenir art,
often overpriced but priced for a specific tourist market. It meets some level
of need in the absence of more authentic work but when you hold it up to the
light against what I would term as being genuine retro and vintage-inspired
art, you can see a huge difference in the quality and in the historical
accuracy.
 |
| Love Cornwall is available from my Fine Art America and Pixels store, notice the background detail of wood panelling with an aged and sun-bleached look. |
Platforms such as Etsy have
massive appeal to vintage and retro buyers and there’s some great aged work on
there that is way better value. More often than not it’s priced even more
competitively than these imported mass-produced prints and if you want even
more authentic pieces, there are plenty of artists who have really managed to
nail the detail on Etsy.
What has the potential to harm
the retro-inspired market is the new ads we’re beginning to see on social media
that promise Print on Demand artists access to more than a thousand or more print
ready designs for less than forty bucks, you pay your money and then you get to
download a lot of images.
These packages are filled with
faux-retro inspired works which may or may not be licensed for commercial use
in some way, they’re being touted as an ideal business start-up in the T-Shirt
and print market, but I can’t see the original artists making anything out of
these. They’re essentially downloads of ready to upload images designed with
the sole intention to take the buyers money and offer a quick way to populate
an online store.
Again, maybe I’m retro old
school but I’m not convinced it’s either moral or ethical. I’m sure some people
would welcome the idea of being able to open a POD account to compete with real
artists, but this type of thing does nothing at all to preserve the integrity
of a market and an industry that has, in all fairness, taken its fair share of
the pandemic beating which has left a lot of real artists out in the cold.
Maybe the POD companies will pick up on these when a million and one of the
same designs start to appear, although I’m not holding out any hope that they
might do that.
Retro as a side hustle or main
business?
When I think back to creating
images back in 1980 and 1981, and then moving through many different home
computer systems, I have always managed to find a market for a particular
vintage style of digital art. There was a brief time in the very early nineties
when it became less popular, but by the time the internet became available to
those members of the public who had an interest in it in 1993, things really
were back to normal as websites were being created and those building them
needed small fast loading images.
This style of work for me was
never a primary business model back then, mostly because everything was still
too young to be called retro as we would know retro today even though the word
retro was first used in the 1970s in French, rétro, short for
rétrograde originated from the Latin word retrogradi, which essentially meant
to “move backward.” It wasn’t really until the mid to late nineties
that I began to notice that people were still feeling nostalgic over the still
relatively recent but increasingly less available original home computer
systems.
We had seen retro used in many
other contexts by this time though, retro clothing was big as I remember in the
nineties. As a trend, I think we can safely say that retro and vintage is more
than just a trend, and if it is, it is perhaps the longest-running trend in the
history of well, trends.
As I said earlier, nostalgia sells, and when
we look back through art history, many of the greatest pieces of art have told
some kind of story or presented some kind of narrative about the past. Where we
once would have seen antiques and family heirlooms, we now see cultural items
becoming our most treasured keepsakes and rather than passing on the heirloom
from generation to generation, we’re now very much in a time where we’re
purchasing those items instead.
Maybe it’s not even nostalgia
in the truest sense that we are yearning for but rather, we need to fill a
craving for emotional continuity. We see it time and time again, Hollywood
re-release new versions of old films, music labels reissue old albums
remastered for new ways of listening and badge the packaging with the term
special edition or anniversary edition, jolting us into a celebration of our
past. As consumers, we buy using emotion, and then we justify with logic, we
feel first and think second. As artists who then sell memories packaged as art,
we become more like impresarios of memory.
However you term retro,
vintage or nostalgia, it’s certainly an easier sell than art. It’s the
emotional hook, it invites the viewer to tell their story and as they tell it
they become ever-increasingly emotionally engaged. It’s hook, after hook, after
emotional hook.
When you sell memories, you’re
no longer only selling art, you’re selling the viewer a memory back, you’re
selling them on your business and the experience you are giving them, and you
are selling them a connection. In short, everything that you typically want to
sell to someone whenever you are selling art, your hardest job is getting them
in the proverbial door to begin with.
Whether you decide to follow a
full-on retro path is something that only you can decide. For me, it
compliments my usual body of work although if I was to focus on retro I don’t
think I would ever be searching for anything new to create, we have an endless
supply of history to work with. Nostalgia sells, emotional continuity puts us
all on a path towards our very own individual emotional horizon, it shapes how
we think, how we behave, what we love, perhaps
remembering where the journey has already taken us is what gives us the proof
that our lives have some evolving meaning.
Do you have any special memories
of growing up that you wish you could relive, or do you ever get reminded of
yesteryear by certain sights, smells or sounds? I’d love to know that it’s not
just me who hankers for the olden and golden days of childhood!
Until next time, as always, stay
safe, stay well, look after each other and stay creative!
Mark x
About Mark…
I am an artist and blogger and
live in Staffordshire, England. My days are filled with art, dog walking and
listening to Rick Astley! You can purchase my art through my Fine Art America
store or my Pixels site here: https://10-mark-taylor.pixels.com and you
can purchase my new works, special and limited editions directly. You can also
view my portfolio website at https://beechhousemedia.com
If you are on Facebook, you
can give me a follow right here, https://facebook.com/beechhousemedia
You can also follow me on Twitter @beechhouseart and on Pinterest at https://pinterest.com/beechhousemedia
If you would like to support
the upkeep of this site or maybe just buy me a coffee, you can do so at my new
Go Fund Me link right here.
[ad_2]
Source link