“Three Paintings After Genoa for The Early” – with Daniel Graham Loxton

Limited Edition Test Pressing Paintings for I Want To Be Ready
Mixed Media, 12.75x12.75 Inches
If you are interested in acquiring a painting please reach out to theearlyband[at]gmail[dot]com 



On three paintings after Genoa for The Early - Daniel Graham Loxton
I listened to the tracks which would become I Want To Be Ready while in Genoa, Italy. With me I had my Olympus XA –a pocket sized camera loaded with grainy Czech film. Genoa is a black and white place near the sea. I was there to deliver a small black painting to a collector who smoked several cigarettes back to back, while I wandered his apartment searching for space to hang my work. In a little nook by the open window I hammered into the dense plaster walls with a single nail hoping it would hold.

Admiring the work, he handed me an envelope of nero–cash, or black, as the old-timers call it– which he took from a locked drawer in an old wooden desk.  Afterwards, we went to his favorite restaurant, just downstairs, for pesto Genovese served with the local pasta called trofie. The pesto was verdant, lemony bright, and perfectly salted. Outside the cathedral of San Lorenzo stood with its stacked slabs of white marble and onyx, catching hints of orange sky, twisting soon to red, then purple, and finally, a dark blue mixing with the sound of the churning sea.

In Italy, I mostly took pictures and made small paintings on paper in watercolor and oil, which I packed into my suitcase and brought home to New York. The grainy black and white film paired well with the smoky sunlit room where I hung my work and the watercolors and oil studies borrowed the colors I saw reflecting against the black and white everything of Genoa. Even the bright green pesto made its way into a series of three green abstract studies which would become the backbone of my compositions later on.

Most often when I’m home in the studio I prefer silence, or low ambient stuff that doesn’t influence my mood too much. But The Early’s music has always sustained me while I paint. The way it builds and weaves textures imperceptibly, coming into and out of focus, rapidly unfurling at times into chaos and then reorganizing into noisy near-silence. I know I’ve “dropped in” when I’ve put on an album in its entirety and it ends without me noticing. While listening to I Want To Be Ready, I often found myself in that elusive state of being. It was under these conditions that these original paintings, which are also album covers, were born.

These limited edition, handpainted album covers are the latest of many collaborations I’ve done with The Early. I’m grateful to have known the members of the band for as long as I’ve been making art, and almost as long as I’ve been alive. We grew up together in Montclair, New Jersey. For a long time Jake and I lived in New York City. Alex moved to Philly where he still calls home. A few years ago I moved to upstate New York, and Jake’s in Chicago. But through the years we’ve gathered just outside of Cooperstown each summer with our families, other old friends, and new ones too. The color photograph of the band that is on the back cover of the album was taken by me, on the porch steps, next to the old terra cotta table where we all have lunch during a recent summer gathering there.

Time-Depth and Test Pressings - The Early
We (Alex and Jake) have spilled a lot of ink over the fact that we’ve been playing music together since our teenage years. Yes, we were in a band called The Early in high school, and yes, we did compete in and eventually win our local battle of the bands, a victory which we sealed with an instrumental cover of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” It’s likely that our friend Danny, or Dan (née Daniel Graham Loxton), was in the audience that night. And though we’re a long way from the music we made in high school, it’s undeniable that the time-depth of our connection helps sustain us as a band. Our music is infinitely more sophisticated–and better–than in our church-basement days, but that is in part because it draws on a shared language and familiarity that has built up over years and even decades.

It’s a joy to share a similar collaborative relationship with Dan, who has created the album art for all of our major releases since we restarted The Early in 2019. We have always found something relatable and enchanting in Dan’s work. His layered abstractions create spaces of intense emotion and introspection through their density, color, and sly sense of humor. Like our music, Dan’s paintings are non-verbal worlds whose narratives reveal themselves through the interplay of formal elements: texture and flatness; silence and noise; brush stroke and collage. His paintings are familiar spaces to us by now, familiar sites of inspiration in which we likewise “drop in. “

“Three paintings after Genoa for The Early” represents a more formal approach to our collaboration. Before the finished LPs for I Want To Be Ready arrived in our hands–graced by two of Dan’s beautiful paintings–we received test pressings from the vinyl plant. Test pressings have a kind of mystical aura in music lore: minimally-labeled short-run versions of the record before the record. We asked Dan to use these blank sleeves as canvases for new work inspired by the album art and the music, creating three one-of-a-kind versions of our LP. The three paintings Dan created are thick with goop, ink stains, layered paper, pesto, and paint, providing a sense of rough materiality and purchase that we strive for in our music. We were tempted to call them visual remixes, but they’re too much of the real thing for that.

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Daniel Graham Loxton seamlessly blends mixed media techniques, encompassing paintings, drawings, and assemblage. His expansion of traditional painting explores universal concepts such as accretion, rhizomatic structures, and entropy. Each piece possesses the ability to take on recognizable symbols or linger as pure abstract forms. Preliminary drawings, text, and collage often reappear as abstracted moments, combining the artist’s interest in Renaissance codexes with contemporary painting. 

https://danielgrahamloxton.com/
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