Robert Beatty has quickly become one of my favorite visual artists, and I was excited to get the chance to talk to him for Bandcamp Daily.
Links to more of my Bandcamp Daily pieces can be found here.
Detail from Tame Impala “Cause I’m A Man” single artwork
Mystique is key to the allure of Robert Beatty’s psychedelic, retro-futuristic artwork and design. His images are untethered in time, synthesizing elements of Surrealism, midcentury experimental animation, 1960s Op Art, underground comix, and the airbrush illustration of the 1970s-1980s. Undulating forms, looping typography, glowing geometric patterns, hazy amorphous spaces, melting objects, diagrams, inscrutable pixelated glyphs, alien landscapes, and glossy advertising imagery comprise strange tableaux, at once familiar and otherworldly—evincing, as Beatty puts it, “a weird sense of wonder.”
“A lot of it is trying to capture when I was a kid, seeing animation or comic books—that feeling you would get from seeing something new and not understanding it—but doing it in a way that’s not strictly pastiche or referential,” he explains. “Because when you’re doing something that’s explicitly retro, it loses some of the impact it would have if…
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