Red Bol

Sunday, 12 October 2008

I know of at lest ten regular readers of this blog who could do a better blog themselves. But some of them are not even publishing anything on the Net and don’t even have a website. Today I received a package from one of these people, Alfred Boland:

I only met Alfred Boland about a year ago, but I have known some of his work for more than half my life. He is one of the people behind Knust, an organisation that made stencilling an art form. In the eighties I used to visit the bookstore Atheneum several times a week. They sold private publications and this was at the height of the private press days, when everybody was making his or her own magazine. I bought dozens a week of these fanzines per week at Atheneum (and other places). I have long given almost everything away to the Small Press Museum in Eeklo, Belgium. (Does anybody know what happened to that organisation?!) I remember some of the publications by Knust: stencilled full colour magazines in impossible sizes and forms, smelling so hard that i kept them in plastic bags. I often had no clue what these publications were about, because it came from another world, but I loved to see them. And Knust printed stuff for other people too, like Marcel Ruyters and other comic artists that I knew.
Knust still exists, but it now operates under the flag of Extrapool. More about that later.
Alfred Boland a.k.a. Red Bol is a graphic designer and the examples of his work that i found in today’s package are spectacular. Here is some more:

Alfred is a spider in web that I know very little of, but from the little that I do know, I wish there was a way to see and hear more of it. Here is a CD for which Alfred did the artwork:

It is a confusing CD by The Nephew Brothers. It is a gospel CD, and it sounds very genuine, but (I guess) it is meant as a parody. There is a thin line between parody and the real thing; in retrospect the distinction often disappears completely. Here is the opening song of this beautiful CD, in which the barrier between the real thing and a parody has completely disappeared to my ears. Please close listen to the lyrics:

.

Comments:

Name*

E-mail address*

Remember me.(Requires cookies)

Spam trap

Comment (max 1024 characters)*

Notify me via e-mail of new comments to this entry.

Submit