Even before you’ve bought the record or gone to the show, the walls of New Zealand’s cities and towns are a festival of music and colour thanks to our many prolific poster artists.
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Phantom Billstickers employee Jamey Holloway is up early for his morning poster run. Party-goers are straggling home as he gets to work.
“We talk about posters being flora for the concrete jungle …” Holloway says the metaphor is that the function of flowers is not just beauty it’s to actually keep things alive keep things going, keep things breeding and evolving and those sorts of things,".
From the psychedelic paintings of the '60s to the crème of the current digital producers, in this documentary for Radio New Zealand’s Music 101, Joe Nunweek talks to the some of the names behind local poster art.
“I used to draw a lot of posters for my friends in the bands and posters for the night clubs and silk screen posters and then eventually I got into doing paintings, just psychedelic kind of things cause after I took LSD, which was legal when I took it,” says artist and musician Archie Bowie, who was designing posters in the ‘60s.
Stuart Page, Terence Hogan, Toby Morris and Hadley Donaldson are also featured in the documentary, which you can listen to here: