OAKLAND — Four decades ago, Bay Area artists filled their posters with raging flames, extravagant skeletons and bare, engorged breasts. This overstuffed style became the visual symbol not only for many late-'60s English and American bands but also a recognizable signature of the entire psychedelic era.
When graphic artist Jason Munn sat down in his studio just across the bay from the old Fillmore West to design a poster for Portland indie rockers the Decemberists, he did not conceive flames or naked women. He thought of the bold geometric design of a midcentury Czech matchbox, adding the fine lines of a bicycle wheel and pine tree that suggested the group's Oregon roots.
When musing on the dreamy, expansive music of Built to Spill, Munn came up with a bucket of paint that brings clouds and blue sky to whatever it touches, evoking both Magritte's visual puns and the band's heavenly sound. For the willowy Canadian singer Feist, his poster offers just one brown feather, fallen gently.
Munn, a mellow 33-year-old in a scruffy beard and plain navy sweater, is a kind of poet of the rock poster -- and a minimalist poet at that. His design firm is called the Small Stakes, after a song by Spoon, and he shares that incisive band's retro aesthetic and less-is-more philosophy.
"I guess my style," the artist said from his studio in a startlingly clean 1920s house, "is very non-rock 'n' roll. The bands I gravitate toward have their own way of thinking about their music, and I try to get that across."
Despite the disproportionate attention lavished on Shepard Fairey, a small, innovative handful of artists-designers is reimagining the possibilities of silk screen and a relatively small rectangular field. These artists show a fascination with the iconography of the past, including book jackets, vinyl records, nature icons and modernist design, in a field that has been radically remade by technology: Like today's vinyl obsessives and neo-craft types, they are post-traditionalists, reveling in, almost fetishizing, print culture after what we're told is the end of print.
Unlike designers who extend the rock tradition of subversion and boundary pushing, Munn's work exudes a Zen-like serenity, a love of negative space and an almost religious reverence for typeface. "I try to pick up on little random bits of a band," said Munn, "and go from there."
