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Traveling to Space and Back with Artist and Musician @bjennymontero
To see more of Ben’s spacey drawings, follow @bjennymontero on Instagram. For more behind-the-scenes music stories, head over to @music.
Stare long enough at the kaleidoscopic inside sleeve of Man It Feels Like Space Again, the new album from Australian rock outfit Pond, and you’ll spot all four band members, tucked behind wires, peaking through crowds and standing in between rows of machinery. The image matches the one on the cover, a colorful comic strip-styled space narrative that has slits allowing you to look inside. The work appears to have derived from a carefully crafted scheme, but as Ben Montero (@bjennymontero), the artist who created it, explains, it began with a looser structure, one that featured happy accidents along the way.
“[It] started as just a little cartoon, one little drawing, and then it kept going, Oh, now it can be an insert, now it will be on the back cover, now it will be on the front cover,” says Ben, who often posts photos of his colorful illustrations. “The reason there are cut-out bits is because I just kept making mistakes. I don’t know how to use the computer program to do that. I am a bit of a caveman when it comes to stuff.”
Ben didn’t consider art as a full-time gig until two years ago. It happened naturally. He was already entrenched in the local music scene, both as a musician and as an artist, creating cover art for his friends’ bands. Then he began to get more requests for his illustrations, and it grew from there.
“I like to work with friends mainly, even if they aren’t great friends,” he says, “as long as it’s an enjoyable vibe for me and something I can get into. I don’t want to start doing jobs for just anybody because they want me to, or because they’ve got some money. It’s got to be like when I first started drawing, just sitting around in a tour van entertaining people.”
Over the years, Ben has brought bursts of color to music posters and comics, collaborating with the likes of singer-songwriters Ariel Pink and Kurt Vile. He’s also devoted his satirical chops to the land of classic rock. In one cartoon strip, Carlos Santana is a ruthless bandleader-cum-dictator, known for slicing people up with pool cues, bombing Cambodia and then disappearing off the face of the earth for 20 years. (For what it’s worth, Ben calls himself a big Santana fan.)
Ben began drawing when he was young, but soon turned his focus to music. He would join the jangly pop band Treetops, and then eventually settle on his current eponymously titled group. Along the way, he continued to take on art projects, both in and outside music. One of his most eccentric ones was for an Italian-based shoe company called New Kid, which asked him to design T-shirts based on ‘60s Turkish psychedelic music. Truthfully, Ben didn’t know much about the genre, so he took his best guess. The resulting image –– blue and green stars, candy-apple red guitars, a pink and orange microphone –– must have stood some litmus test: Shortly after, Ben got an email in broken English from a kid in Turkey telling him that his work “perfectly sums up psychedelic music.”
“I was like, ‘Wow, Jesus, thank you. I hope I didn’t insult the culture.’”
The New Kid project was one of the few Ben has worked on that’s not tangentially related to music. As for that creative outlet, he’s still keeping at it. It’s just harder for him; it always has been.
“Music that I want to make is completely unnatural and non-simple,” he says. “It’s a lot more of a struggle. Drawing has always been the thing that I do for therapy. And music is just something that haunts me.”
–– Instagram @music
by via Instagram Blog
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