Interview with Adam Turman for The Star Tribune and Vita.mn

"Bars, Bikes and Beers" by Adam Turman


Photo by Richard Tsong-Taatarii



It's Thursday night and poster designer Adam Turman is in his screen-printing studio, drinking a beer and laying down layers of yellow and blue in a fervor. You've probably seen Turman's work at some point -- two-color or three-color images of Minneapolis landmarks, busty pinup girls and shiny bikes. On this night, he's making wedding invitation posters, and getting ready for the busy spring art season, which for him kicks off with a solo show at FrameUps Gallery this month and leads to group shows at ArtCrank and Art-A-Whirl.

Turman's career started out like most professionals who leave the University of Minnesota with a graphic design degree, but after a few job switches and layoffs, Turman began focusing more on getting his own art out there. Friendships with local designers like Steve Tenebrini of Squad 19 and DWITT led Turman to the world of gig poster design.

"Gig posters are like the absolute perfect little design project because there's a deadline, limitations and you're designing something for a band," Turman says.

Eventually, Turman found that bike enthusiasts were just as eager for art as the local music scene. "The bicycle is a thing of pure beauty," Turman explains. "In my mind, it's one of the most well-designed machines. There's a simplicity to it, but you can make it so unique and so you."

Turman's has since whittled down his poster motifs to what he calls the "four Bs" -- bikes, beers, babes and burgers. But while his blend of Americana and cycling has made him one of the most popular illustrators representing Minneapolis, his cityscapes may be playing the largest role in his growing fame. There's a sense of wide-eyed awe in the urban prints, as the angles render the landmarks larger than life. On his "Grain Belt Sign (Version 3) Red," his often muted use of color takes a turn for bold reds that challenge the serenity of the scene. That image, and prints of the Ritz Theater and the Gold Medal Flour sign, have sold so well that Turman plans to embark on a nationwide road trip to capture the icons of other states.

Turman bounces his ideas off his wife, Sara, a speech pathologist for the Hopkins school district, to see if they have potential. "She's not artsy-fartsy-minded like I am," he says. "She'll tell me what's what." The couple have two daughters, Ada, 5, and Mae, 3, and Turman hopes to cultivate their artistic talents. "My oldest, she's taken to art," he says. "I try and support her. Pretty much every holiday or birthday I just get her art supplies."

To be close to his family, Turman built his printing studio in the garage of their St. Louis Park home. The space is cozy and bright, with a speckled red floor and inspirational prints along the walls and ceilings. Some are by friends, some by heroes, and one of his favorites, an oil painting of a tiger, is by his grandma. "She gave it to me at 7, and it's been in every studio I've ever had," Turman explains.

Up next for the designer is a foray into the art of letterpress, as well as a continued expansion of his brand through his website. His latest design, a poster of Portland, uses giant bike tires to display the city's status as a cycling haven. But his loyalty to Minnesota bikers still shows.

"We would kick Portland's ass if they had a winter," he jokes.

Notes on this story: I wanted to interview Adam Turman because my sister and her husband are huge fans of his bike posters. Of course I got lost on my way to his house and he was very patient in giving me directions. In no way is Turman a tortured, fussy artist. I hung out at his studio for a couple hours, transcribing away, and like most stories, only about 1/15th of the material made the cut.

Interview with Bryce Dessner of Clogs, The National

A Clogs fan is someone whose Saturday afternoon plans might include reading Proust and playing "Guitar Hero." While the link between "Swann's Way" and "Slow Ride" may seem tenuous to some, Clogs' blend of classic strings with contemporary indie composition is catnip to listeners more attuned to the differences between Coke and Pepsi than between high and low culture.

The group's fifth and latest album (due March 2), "The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton," is one of the year's most novel, well-crafted releases. Its buzz stems in part from the indie cred of its contributors, including Matt Berninger, lead singer of the National; Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond, and eccentric folk darling Sufjan Stevens.

The band itself is composed of Australian composer Padma Newsome and Americans Rachael Elliott, Thomas Kozumplik and the National's Bryce Dessner, all friends since studying music together at Yale. They play two concerts this week at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis.

Clogs' sound mixes classical music with tight structures and glittering, folk-inspired moods to create something striking but inscrutable. Their theatric vocals, complex arrangements and mathematically precise method of musical storytelling is worth getting to know.

The opener, "Cocodrillo," uses the Italian word for crocodile in a wall of vocal sound that breaks down the phonetic components of the word amid Cathedral-like harmonies. "Last Song" features vocals by Berninger, who sadly repeats, "This was our last song" over horns and delicately plucked guitars.

Dessner, 33, has curated Cincinnati's experimental music festival MusicNOW, collaborated with Philip Glass and joined his brother, Aaron, in producing the AIDS-benefit album "Dark Was the Night." In a recent phone interview, he discussed Clogs' latest record as well as the much-anticipated May release by the National.
Q The new Clogs record and the National's "Boxer," from 2007, are so different. If each of those CDs were books, what would they be?

A I would say the Clogs record would be like a [Gabriel García] Marquez, almost like surrealist. It's pretty playful and colorful and stylistic. I think the National's "Boxer" would be something more like an American novel, like Cormac McCarthy or Steinbeck, or like [Kent Haruf's] "Plainsong" ... something that talks about everyday lives. They're apples and oranges.

Q The lyrics are minimal on the new album, but often repeated, which places a lot of emphasis on the word choice. How do you guys choose what to say in those important moments?

A The lyrics are all written by Padma. In the past, we've been primarily an instrumental ensemble. Padma's been writing songs forever. He works the way a poet would work where he's writing separately from the music. As for the repetition of certain phrases, certainly in a song like "Cocodrillo," the first piece, it's more this game. It sounds like a children's game, where they're just listing Italian words for different animals. So in that case, that piece is more of a choral piece, and the vocals themselves are in a wild place, almost like separate instruments.

Q You are known as an improvising quartet. How true is that?

A I think at the beginning it was really true. The four musicians all went to music school together. At that point in time, 10 years ago, I was playing a lot of rock. Everyone else's immediate surroundings were mostly classical. Improv wasn't part of what we were doing in school. On that level, it was a break from that tradition of classical ensemble. We wanted to develop collaboration and use that live. When we play there's still a fair amount of improv going on, but not in the way a jazz ensemble improvises. This new album is mostly composed, so there's very little that's actually improvised.



Q Which indie bands are you excited about right now?

A There was tons of awesome music this past year. In New York, Dirty Projectors were a band I've known for a long time and I was excited to see them do really well.
Q What else are you working on?

A We're finishing a new record for the National. We don't have a title. It's almost done but usually the title comes the last couple days.

Q Is there a theme to the track names?

A My brother, when he writes demos for our singer, often will have a running series of themes to different song titles. On the last, they were all named after months. This time, it's all Civil War battlefields. There's a song called "Fredericksburg," and "Truth Mountain." There's a song called "Blood Buzz," a song called "Runaway" and "L.A. Cathedral."

The Commission: Dana Maltby

Dana Maltby is the rare artist who can sign his work using light. That’s because he specializes in a little-known arm of fine art photography in which light is “painted” onto an image using luminous tools and cameras set for ultra-slow exposure times. Amazingly, this so-called “light art performance photography” generally doesn’t employ post-production touchups. All Maltby used to create this otherworldly scene is, as he puts it, “the crappiest single-lens SLR you can get,” and light-up toys and manipulated Christmas lights. His main subject tends to be his own acrobatic silhouette, which he prefers to shoot in abandoned buildings or sewer tunnels in Minneapolis. “I’ve been telling people part of [my art] is being a little scared, out there by myself,” he says of his potentially treacherous shooting locales. “It wouldn’t be the same without the danger.” The recent grad of the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul says that he hopes this unique art form becomes more commonplace in the photography world, adding that, “it’s like anything—hip hop, skateboarding—the more people do it, the greater it grows.”

Camera: Canon EOS REBEL T1i; exposure: 99 seconds; aperture: f/5.0 ISO: 100; taken: 8/3/09

Notes on this article: I talked to Dana Maltby for about an hour. It turned out he was about my age, which made me feel under-accomplished. This interview actually has a long addition to it, which covers him dealing with a similar artist dying, although I'm not sure it ever went up on the website.

Artists We Love: Viet Do

Age: 39

Hails from: Vietnam

What brought him to Minneapolis: The appreciation of art and design in Minneapolis; seeing that a lot of the designers I admired were working in Minneapolis; the appeal of having seasons. I wanted to move somewhere completely new when I was young, because I knew it would be harder when I was older.

On designing for Target (he worked on a campaign that created a series of Target gift cards that doubled as rubber ducks, bubble wands and garden kits): It’s pretty cool working for a client like Target. They really “get” design. How many clients ask to be challenged with new ideas all the time? They are constantly moving, and as a designer, I still get new challenges every day.

Design versus art: Being a designer makes it harder for me to be an artist. I struggle with the need to always have a problem to solve. Sometimes I have to force myself to just start drawing, without a purpose or idea ahead of time.

Tips for teaching art to kids: I like to compliment my kids on the colors, textures or compositions of their work versus how well they actually drew something. I don’t want them to lose the joy of just creating. I am really jealous of a lot of their compositions; they usually have very strong and simple pieces that blow away the stuff that takes me hours to figure out.

Why he doesn't title and sign his work: I usually don’t sign my work because I am not used to that idea. In design, all of your work is anonymous. It's pretty rare for a designer to take credit for his work. Plus, I think my signature looks weird.

Notes: For this story, I wanted to profile a designer in advertising, because I think a lot of people don't even notice how jam-packed with impressive design the ads they see every day are. I called Little & Co. because they do a lot of the Target design, and they told me Viet Do was their up-and-comer. When he came into the studio, Do was very humble. He brought a set of watercolor brush-simulating black markers and drew on the background while I interviewed him. At the end, he didn't want to sign his name, which I thought was a refreshing lack of self-absorption for an artist.

Artists We Love: Marc Sijan

Resides: Milwaukee, Wis.

On his preferred style: I prefer realism. I think mankind has interpreted the human form since the beginning of time. Human anatomy is the most often-used subject matter. My thing was to develop realism on a three-dimensional scale.

On using his father as a model: The most popular piece I’ve ever done is my father. It’s a psychologically interesting probe: of all the sculptures, your father became the most important one.

On creating a Jesus sculpture: I did casting from sections of anatomy and I assembled it all like parts of a puzzle. Then I became a painter. I picked up my paints and magnifying glass and painted freckles, moles and age spots.

On inspiring a gastric bypass: This heavy-set guy came around to the studio all the time—he was turning into a groupie. He said, “If you ever need a real big guy [as a model], let me know.” One day I just said, “Let me do it.” Later, he walked in and stood in front of the sculpture (pictured at right) and he stared and stared and said, “Marc, I never realized I was that big.” He left in shock, called the doctor and scheduled a gastric bypass. He came back to the exhibit six months later. He was like a before-and-after shot.

On breathing into his sculptures: I was all by myself in the studio on a Friday night. My friends were out playing and I was working. I thought, “I want this to come to life, to flourish.” I don’t talk about this very often, but I put my mouth over the mouth of the sculpture to breathe life into it. It was corny. I felt uncomfortable with myself.

On his self-portrait in sculpture form: I rediscovered it in storage last year after 20 years. I realized in a heartbeat how fast 20 years went by.

Notes on this article:I first saw Marc Sijan's at The Uptown Art Fair and I was blown away. As a wanna-be artist myself, hyper-realistic art is one of my favorite genres, and his pieces all had a forlornness about them that seemed to reflect Sijan's personal universe. I talked to him twice for the interview while he was driving into Minneapolis for another Uptown Art Fair. When he came to the office for his photo shoot, he rolled in driving a big white van full of disembodied head sculptures and limbs in progress. He carried his sculpture in with the help of the art director, Bryan, and everyone in the office stopped and stared in horror at the stiff body we were shoving into the elevator. It was pretty funny.