In the process of preparing Jewly Hight’s review of the new King Wilkie album for the ND website today, I came across the extensive drawings done for the album’s packaging and promotional usage by an artist named Lila Freeman, with whom I was not previously familiar. When it came time to select a photo to run with the review, I had the option of just grabbing a standard shot of the band, or painstakingly arranging the character-portraits that accompany the concept-album’s theme into a fourteen-piece composite. Ultimately the illustrations could not be denied, even if it took far longer to put it all together.
Her sketches are simple, yet quite affecting in their way; I can see why the King Wilkie folks felt she’d be a fine choice to illustrate the loosely-structured but somewhat elaborate fictional family around which they built their new album. Her drawings feel right alongside the music, helping to provide their record with an increasingly rare distinction: It’s a unified piece of art that extends beyond just the sonic signals embedded on MP3 files. There’s something very late-’60s/early-’70s about it….and that is a very good thing, indeed.
Apparently Freeman is of some renown in certain circles among the New York crowd, and recently had a showing of her work at a Soho gallery. Someone shot and edited a rather nice video of the event, with excellent accompanying music (the Be Good Tanyas’ version of “Lakes Of Pontchartrain”, and the New Pornographers’ “Challengers”). What’s nice about the video is that, like the artist’s drawings, it’s essentially just an extensive collection of portraits, in this case documenting all the people who attended the shindig — faces talking, smiling, watching, ruminating, reveling. The artist herself is in there somewhere, apparently, but she isn’t identified; it’s up to you to figure that out, if it matters to you. It didn’t, to me; I got the point, and I appreciated the art all the more.
