d.a. levy night poster

Rummaging around the attic yesterday I found a big box filled with posters I collected over the years, many of them from the 70s and 80s, including this one that combines silk-screening with rubber stamping. The title of the poster: UKANHAVYRFUCKINCITIBAK—REVISITED refers to a collection of d.a. levy's work published in 1968, shortly after he committed suicide.

The poster capsulizes several things that I was interested in at the time (late 70s): low-tech, low-budget printing, a handmade look, and of course the youthful rebellion of d.a. levy himself.

A couple of things about the poster: the lettering was probably done with a brush using a resist method on the silkscreen stencil, something I played with a bit.

I definitely used the "split fount" technique that you see here. By applying multiple colors of ink directly to the stencil, as you print the colors mix and blend in a somewhat random way. No two posters are alike. You can do that same thing on an offset press, and I managed to find ways to use this in a few client projects.

The hand-stamped additions might have been planned in the case of "REVISITED", "FREE" and "A DEAD FISH PRODUCTION", or accidental (the missing "E" in "open").

Preparing a stencil with this much hand lettering is a fairly tedious process. If you made a mistake on the last line, as happens here, correcting it with a stamp would be a pretty attractive alternative.

Tomorrow I'm taking the poster and a copy of The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle to Cleveland State to donate to their extensive collection of d.a. levy memorabilia, part of the libary's Cleveland Memory project.

 

 

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