100 Block Rock

Another favourite illustration I produced for Discorder magazine is the very first one I contributed—way back in January 2021! Accompanying a review for “100 Block Rock”, a compliation album of music by artists based in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), this assignment really gave me a chance to explore some themes of hope and community based on the album’s lyrics.

Here’s the brief from the artistic director at Discorder:

The 100 Block of Hastings in Vancouver, BC, Canada—the stolen and unceded territories of the Coast Salish People—is as maligned as it is celebrated, loved as it is hated, envied as it is reviled. Anyone that has seen it has an opinion on the area. Often it’s a visceral reaction. The typical is a predictable black and white verdict on a neighborhood; a community that many at best refuse to understand and at worst, vilify. It’s an area that every politician, property owner, social worker, and police officer has an opinion on, yet, rarely do you hear the voices that come from within.

100 Block Rock is a compilation of Vancouver BC’s most marginalized community of artists. People working, living and creating in the Downtown Eastside (DTES)—frequently referred to as ’the country’s poorest postal code’. It features 11 tracks of mixed-genre music. From folk to punk and pop to funk. 100 Block Rock is the platform for these people to speak for themselves. It’s the voice of a community constantly on the verge of extinction from a drug war, colonial genocide, gentrification and the lack of political will to create substantial change. In Bud Osborn’s testament to survival he wrote ‘I’m so amazingly alive, I’m dancing on my own grave!’ When listening to this record it’s important to ask yourself what or whose grave you might be dancing on.

For the illustrations I’m thinking keeping it to symbols of the locality—Hastings. I would love for the illustrations to be vibrant and not demeaning of the neighbourhood. We want to convey the artistry that is born on Hastings.

I definitely took that last part to heart! The cover image, seen above, reproduces a sidewalk mosaic on the northeast corner of Hastings and Main. This is one of 31 mosaics that were created in 2021 as part of the Footprints Community Art Project. This walking tour visits all of them. I also used lyrics from the 100 Block Rock album in each of my images—many of the outlines and details in the cover image are covered with tiny text as a result. At this time, we were also restricted to a very limited palette for printing, so I wanted to explore halftone patterns to add some stylized blending.

The halftones are very obvious in one of my spot illustrations, which features the façade of the Carnegie Community Centre decorated with orange shirts. I only did two spots for this, I guess I was just finding my feet. I do like the way they turned out though.

Find the online article here and a PDF of the February-March 2021 issue here.