The work of this month’s PureHoney featured artist, Brian Reedy, might look familiar and not just because he’s a Miamian. Reedy’s block prints have been licensed for use by Warner Bros., Marvel, DC, Disney and Fortnite, and have even landed on t-shirts at your local Hot Topic.
Reedy starts out with visual art’s oldest reproducible technique: blank paper and an ink-stained, graven block. From there, the hand-printed images scale and migrate digitally to all kinds of media. With the whole history of printmaking bearing down on him, Reedy has carved out his place in the canon — one stretching from ukiyo-e to Banksy — with ingenuity and aplomb.
What sets him apart is subject matter. “I suppose you could classify the common elements in my artwork as being influenced by ‘geek culture,’” Reedy tells PureHoney. “Although I wonder if there is a more contemporary way of describing that, because so many things like comics, anime, and toys have become so mainstream in current society it’s no longer that fringe interest pertaining only to geeks!”
“But my block print technique inherently has references to Medieval European and Japanese artwork,” he adds. “I would be hard-pressed to coin a phrase that would best describe the mix of those visual styles and subject matter!”
Reedy says he found that the inherently pictographic quality of block printing “worked perfectly” for his kind of imagery. To the degree that his pieces have an audience and an outlet through major pop culture entities, he says it’s due to “the uniqueness of the block print look, not necessarily because of my drawing abilities.”
“There is a novelty to the style that is very eye-catching,” Reedy says, “so when you walk into a Hot Topic store, my shirts are noticeable because the technique is so different.”
Reedy likens the block printing method to “making a giant stamp.”
Printmaking once served as a cost-effective way to mass produce imagery on anything that would adhere to paper or cloth — decorative art, book illustrations, wanted posters, t-shirts. Today, thanks to digital graphic design tech, seemingly any surface is fair game.
“The work I do for Hot Topic has not just been for t-shirts: they also reproduce my images for a variety of products like large blankets,” Reedy says. “I’m often pleasantly surprised how well some of my small prints look terrific when reproduced in a large scale.”
Another running theme in Reedy’s work is simply, in his words, “the bizarre.”
“I have had a life-long fascination with the bizarre and unusual,” he says. “I grew up in Alton, Illinois, considered to be one of the most haunted towns in the United States. It was also home of Robert Wadlow, the world’s tallest man, and the legend of the Piasa Bird monster.
“In the state of Florida,” he continues, “my favorite place for inspiration in the odd and unusual is St. Augustine. That town is a real gem and is rich in history and strangeness. The cobblestone streets downtown take you back in time and have a real old-world European feel. And the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum is filled with fun oddities and curiosities.”
Another site of inspirational weirdness for Reedy is the Koreshan Unity Settlement in Estero’s Koreshan State Park. “The Koreshans were a religious community who moved to Florida in 1894 to form a utopian ‘New Jerusalem,’’ Reedy says. “They believed we exist inside a concave hollow Earth — the continents and oceans are on the inside crust of our planet and the sky is in the center.”
Reedy also finds a spark in music — “a vital part of my creative process,” he says.
“I like rock, hip-hop, classical, alternative, electronic, etc. I like everything from anime soundtracks to theatre show tunes,” Reedy says. “I used to have a category of music that I felt embarrassed if a friend were to discover it on my playlist, like Vocaloid music for example. Vocaloid is Japanese pop music made from a series of computer programs, and each program is a fictitious pop idol with a distinctive voice. I used to think of this as a guilty pleasure, but I like it so why should I be ashamed of it?”
Follow Brian Reedy at brianreedy.bigcartel.com and instagram.com/brianreedy ~ Kelli Bodle
