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The Metric cover art triggered us to seek you out. They’re pretty popular around here.

Metric has been interesting. A lifelong friend of mine, Mike Andrews, produced Metric’s first album. This was four to five years ago and essentially my first freelance gig. It was their first album and we were all kind of young and excited, and I got in at the ground roots with those guys and helped to define their look and all that. As fate would have it, it’s been a really great relationship. I live in San Diego and they’re bopping all over the world; it works. I’m actually working -- and I don’t know if this is confidential or not -- on Emily Haines’s solo album.

Cool.

I guess you can mention that but I can’t really tell you anything else about it.

I think the name and track list are out there…

I’ll send you the music files.

Oh, hey, right on.

[Laughs.] Yeah, can’t do that. But oddly enough, I probably have a bigger following in Canada than in the United States because of the work I’ve done with those guys.

Being a music fan, does creating artwork for music require a different kind of approach?

In a way it does because it’s a collaborative thing. I almost always try to sit and listen to the record a couple hundred times before I even start to design anything, just to get a sense of what I think the visual end should be. It’s massively important to me that the music and art work together, that it’s one-to-one, and that you really see the same energy in the artwork that you feel in the music. If the music’s poppy then the artwork should be poppy, and if the music is quiet then the artwork should be quiet.

I forgot who told me this, but I have to keep in mind that I may work on an album for two or three weeks, but the artist has it for the rest of their life. So it’s really important that they be happy with the artwork because it represents them and they need to love it as much as anybody.

You mentioned McDonald’s was one of your bigger gigs. Was it pretty surreal to see your artwork on McDonald’s stuff?

Yeah, definitely. Here’s how that fell out: Dave Kinsey, a very good friend of mine, has an agency called BLK MRKT and this was such a huge project that he called me up and said, “I want you to art direct this piece, so I need you to move up here [LA] for a month and just bang this thing out.” It was a great experience. It was also very stressful and one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever done. The client was very, very controlling. They wanted graffiti and all this stuff but they didn’t want it to be too edgy… you know, very McDonald’s.

It was surreal, yes, in that this stuff was printed all over North and South America. Okay, so it was everywhere. But my name was nowhere on it. More eyeballs saw it than anything else I’ve ever done, but I never got one single email or anything from it. That’s the way this shit works. It can be the biggest thing in the world but if nobody knows you did it… Whereas the Metric thing has my name and website on it and everyone can find me.

So is it a constant balance then? Do you ever pick the cooler, smaller things in order to get your name out?

It’s definitely a balance. I’ll work for MTV and I’ll make hardly any money, but it at least gets me some creative freedom. Or I may do some brochure for a real estate company and I don’t want anyone on the planet to know I had anything to do with it. It’s just money. And that’s a sad fact of life. When you’re a freelancer you take what you can get. I don’t want to say that I’m just a slut out there for work, but there definitely is a balance. I want some things to pay the bills, and I want other things to flex my muscle and say this is my new take on X, Y, or Z. Taking on projects that may have little or no budget are often more fun, and I’d much rather people know me for that kind of stuff.

Let’s discuss your gallery. How did Cassius King come about?

About three years ago I decided to open my own gallery here in San Diego. At that time there weren’t really any galleries in the area showing up-and-coming contemporary artists. There’s a lot of stodgy art like landscape paintings, but none of what I was interested in seeing -- the work that exists in Giant Robot, Tokion, and Juxtapoz. So I thought, “Let’s open a space and show different artists.” And it worked well because the gallery was near the convention centre. So when conventions came to town, such as the Comic-Con or something like that, we would put together a really compelling show because people were only a couple blocks away. We were able to get some killer talent at various points in time.

The gallery doesn’t exist anymore, sadly, because I just didn’t have the time to focus on it. I closed it about six months ago. It was sad but it’s allowed me to do other things.

Where did the name come from?

The gallery was called Cassius King, which from the beginning was a play on words meaning “cash is king.” In commerce, money talks. But people always had their misconceptions like, “Oh, this is named after Cassius Clay.” And I would say Cassius King was a person that we based the whole thing around and I kind of created this myth about who Cassius King was. It was a fun name with many meanings and everyone could take what they wanted from it. So I’ve always liked that idea -- lying to people.

[Laughs.] Well you’re an artist right? I mean, that’s part of it.

Yeah, that’s part of the deal. These are all lies. None of this is real. This is all fake. That and it’s a control issue; you get to do whatever you want. How often do we have that chance in this world? So you definitely have to embrace it when you can.

Did the control issue drive you to art when you were a kid?

Yeah, I’m sure boredom caused, and then led to, a hundred million things. I’ve always been into art and just making things. It just morphed every week or month or so into something else.

 

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