Remember when you were a kid, and life was all about fantasy, creativity and discovery? For Lexington’s Robert Beatty, that childhood curiosity often manifested in taking apart toys to create strange electronic music or delving into the concept of video feedback by pointing the camcorder at the television, unprompted.
As an adult, intuition and using things in unintended ways remain important tools for Beatty. He not only still carries that spirit of wonder and fascination, but he also incorporates it into a successful career as a visual artist and musician.
In both his music and his visual art, Beatty employs splicing together looping, drooping and swirling colors, shapes and sounds to create compelling abstract narratives. Morphing familiar forms into skewed-but-recognizable manifestations, his work speaks at once to the past, the present and to a distant unknown. Beatty’s digital illustrations, which have been described as “futuristic” and “otherworldly,” have become increasingly sought-after in recent years, having been featured in publications like the New York Times, Wired and New Yorker Magazine, as well on album covers for a growing array of well-known musicians.
The audience and reach of his art was catapulted to new heights after the popular Australian psych rock band Tame Impala commissioned him to create the cover of their 2015 album “Currents,” having come across his work designing covers for other bands with less international visibility. That project quickly led to an avalanche of additional album art commissions, from artists ranging from experimental psych pioneers The Flaming Lips to alternative pop princess Ke$ha. He’s since been commissioned by Nike, featured in Rolling Stone and had his work displayed on an L.A. billboard on Sunset Boulevard.
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”The Scoop,” created for Nike’s “Art of a Champion” collection, in which 16 artists were commissioned to illustrate historic moments in NBA history. Original artwork by Robert Beatty
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Illustration for the New York Times. Original artwork by Robert Beatty
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“Pondering Voyagers’ Interstellar Journeys, and Our Own,” an illustration for the New York Times’ opinion page. Original artwork by Robert Beatty
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Illustration for The New Yorker. Original artwork by Robert Beatty
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An illustration for The New York Times article “A Brief History of How Your Privacy Was Stolen.” Original artwork by Robert Beatty
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Artwork for Tame Impala’s 2015 album “Currents.” Original artwork by Robert Beatty
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Artwork for Real Estate's 2012 7-inch “Easy.” Original artwork by Robert Beatty
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Artwork for The Flaming Lips' 2017 album "Oczy Mlody." Original artwork by Robert Beatty
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Artwork for Mister Heavenly's 2017 album "Boxing the Moonlight." Original artwork by Robert Beatty
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Artwork for Idiot Glee's 2011 album "Paddywhack." Original artwork by Robert Beatty
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Artwork for the 2015 self-titled album from Mondo Drag. Original artwork by Robert Beatty
“It’s pretty amazing to me I get to make a living doing this – sometimes [the people] I get to work with just blows my mind,” said Beatty. “I guess the right vibes were out there and seemed to lead me to the right people.”
Primarily creating his digital art using a 10-year-old Windows computer and a version of Photoshop that has long since been updated several times, Beatty has unquestionably established a wholly unique visual style. He is quick to credit a number of influences, however, many stemming from left-of-center pop culture from across the ages.
“One of the things that I take the most inspiration from is ’60s and ‘70s experimental film and animation – there’s so much incredible mind-blowing animation that came out of Poland and the Czech Republic during that time, probably most famously seen in the film ‘Fantastic Planet,’” Beatty said. The films of early computer art pioneers Lillian Schwartz and Stan VanDerBeek, created in the science and industrial center Bell Labs around that same time, are another “huge point of reference” for the artist.
But as a kid, Beatty’s mind was cracked open by hours spent paging through Mad Magazine and watching MTV’s “Liquid Television,” a late night show from the ’90s that showcased a variety of weird independent animation. He traces his gravitation toward airbrush stylings – an integral part of his signature visual aesthetic – to the animated sequences in “Monty Python.” But while he says he was largely an indoor kid who spent much of his time drawing and pursuing other solitary artistic endeavors, the significance of nature and history wasn’t lost on Beatty as a young artist. Perhaps just as influential to his work – and his brain, in general – are childhood memories of finding arrowheads and other artifacts that would surface in the freshly plowed fields on the Jessamine County tobacco farm where he grew up.
“Just being aware that there are things that have been here for thousands of years, and how that connects to things that are happening today – that’s a big influence,” Beatty said.
The concept of using found objects as a jumping off point to explore the connection between past, present and future comes into play in Beatty’s multi-media installation Place Holder, on display at 21c Museum Hotel Lexington through mid-January. The work is an assemblage of building-shaped concrete forms, displayed like a newly excavated city in a darkened room. Viewers quickly realize they are being observed by cameras that are part of the artwork, their movements tracked and projected onto a wall behind the sculpture. Cast out of a variety of discarded modern-day plastic packaging – from condiment ramekins to battery packs – the shapes are reminiscent of Aztec pyramids, Brutalist architecture and vaguely futuristic amoebas. The installation is a nod to both the past and to the unfortunate reality of the present, in which all are subjected to one kind of surveillance or another.
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Beatty's recent work “Place Holder” is on display at 21c Museum Hotel Lexington through mid-January. Photo by Mick Jeffries
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Beatty's recent work “Place Holder” is on display at 21c Museum Hotel Lexington through mid-January. Photo by Mick Jeffries
“The surveillance thing plays into [questions of] ’what if civilization ends?’ and the ruins of what we have,” Beatty explained, adding that, “nobody’s left, but there’s still this surveillance system showing you what’s going on.”
On the surface, the installation appears to be a bit of a departure from the work for which Beatty is most well-known: digital montages juxtaposing human and animal forms, figures from nature and outer space, and/or scientific imagery into brightly colored, slightly hallucinatory 2-D scenes. But it stems from the same core and process that much of the artist’s work does: splicing together familiar snippets of data – be they images, sounds or ideas – in a way that’s somehow out of sync with what’s expected.
In high school, Beatty and his good friend Trevor Tremaine experimented with making tape collages and four-track recordings in a Jessamine County bedroom that he describes as being “all over the place – noise stuff, weird pop music, weird improvised whatever.”
“It doesn’t make any sense that we were playing this stuff when we were 14,” he said with a laugh. “We didn’t really have that many other friends, and we were trying to find and make the weirdest stuff we could, because there was nothing else to do growing up in a small town like that.”
Just out of high school, Beatty, Tremaine and a handful of Lexington compadres formed the electronic noise band Hair Police, leading Beatty to his first hints of notoriety when the group attracted unexpected international attention. (The group ultimately toured alongside indie-noise giants Sonic Youth in 2004.)
Though Hair Police is no longer, Beatty has performed and recorded in a variety of other bands and solo monikers over the past two decades. The adjectives used to describe his visual style – surreal, abstract, avant garde – could just as easily apply to his music compositions, which he himself describes as collage-like and “hard to pin down.” Using elements from lots of sources, his musical projects have been influenced by a number of niche genres, from electronica to free jazz to psychedelic pop – though he has a knack for and inclination toward creating art that can’t very well be pigeonholed into any specific genre. Today, he primarily performs under his own name, having recently dismantled the Three Legged Race moniker he had created and performed his solo music under for many years. As with his digital art, he largely relies on “outdated technology” to create music – old iPhones in this case.
“I don’t like to buy new things to make art or music with – I like to wait for things to come to me or to find things at thrift stores or whatever,” he said. “That scavenger mentality plays into everything I do.”
Belgian fashion designer Dries Van Noten commissioned Beatty to collaborate on a fashion line, resulting in a series of high profile window displays featuring the artist’s designs across Europe in 2018. Photo furnished
The steady commissions and collaborations with artists who he admires keep this scavenger feeling fascinated and fortunate. Beatty was recently commissioned to do a show poster for experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger, whom he cites as having been highly influential on his work over the years. He describes the experience as “surreal.” Other notable recent partnerships include working with famous Belgian fashion designer Dries Van Noten on a line of clothing designs that became part of a series of high profile window displays in Paris, Antwerp and Tokyo last winter, and traveling to Beijing to play several concerts as part of his work with video artist Takeshi Murata – a trip he described as a once-in-a lifetime experience.
“It all feels very precarious – like it could disappear at any moment,” he added. “But hopefully I’ll be able to do this forever.”
Beatty took some time recently to answer a handful of questions for writer Celeste Lewis. For more examples of his work, visit
www.robertbeatty.com.
What can you say about your early interest in music, and how that developed? I became interested in music when I was in middle school and realized pretty quickly that it could be a gateway to a world bigger than the small town I grew up in. I discovered [University of Kentucky college radio station] WRFL as a teenager, and my tastes pretty quickly went down the rabbit hole of finding the strangest most out-there music that I could, be it free jazz, experimental electronic music or whatever. As soon as I was done with high school I volunteered at WRFL and got a radio show of my own, which led to meeting tons of likeminded people whom I ended up playing music with.
What music are you listening to these days? I’m always listening to tons of different stuff, lots of jazz, electronic music, synth pop, minimalist composers, psych pop, really anything that clicks. Some recent music I really like is Joshua Abrams and the Natural Information Society, Kadhja Bonet, Patience, Ziemba, Helado Negro, Carla Dal Forno, Jam Money, Josiah Steinbrick.
What genres of music do you most enjoy performing and working in? My own music is usually really free form and improvised. My solo work has gotten more structured and melodic over the years, but it is still pretty chaotic when I play live. In general with music and art, I try to make something that is a blend that is hard to classify, taking elements from lots of different worlds and combining them. Most of the things I like are not straightforward genre exercises and are harder to pin down.
Tell me about your bands. I mostly play solo these days under my own name. But over the years I’ve played with Hair Police, Burning Star Core, Eyes and Arms of Smoke, Three Legged Race [my long running and now defunct solo project] and with several different configurations of the [Lexington-based collective] Resonant Hole, which has evolved into the Jeanne Vomit-Terror band. Like I said before, I try to keep things open-ended as far as style. A lot of people call the bands I’ve been in as ‘noise,’ but even that is a somewhat closed and limiting classification. The music I play combines elements of improvisation, drone, collage and repetition but can also be very structured and composed at times.
Share a little about your process when it comes to visual art. Where do your ideas come from? How do you choose a palette? A composition? I have a home studio for computer work, and I also work in a larger space where I can do more constructed, messier work. I tend to just sit down and start making things. I’ll think about ideas more than I ever sketch things out or plan. I usually just make several elements and then rearrange them until they feel right and then add color toward the end. One nice thing about making art in the computer is that you can work in a really flexible way.
What’s the most challenging commission you have received so far? I’m not sure I could pinpoint one specific project that was the most challenging – everything has its own ups and downs. Probably no one has seen the projects that were the most challenging because they never fully came to fruition. I like the challenge of editorial illustration work and having to make something that conveys an idea succinctly in a few hours under a tight deadline. There’s some sort of weird freedom that comes with that pressure that allows me to just channel my ideas into a finished piece pretty quickly and directly.
What does the future of art look like to you? What are some of the interesting things you see happening? Most art that people say are futuristic, like augmented reality and things like that, just seem cheesy and sort of empty to me. I’m really more interested in continuing things from the past that I feel like have more potential and weren’t fully explored, and still have some life left in them – and hopefully by doing that, pushing things further into the future. Technology has already long been a part of everything we do, so I’m not sure how much further we can enhance art with it. I think people are always going to be interested in drawing and painting more than anything else anyway.
What is a favorite go-to place in Lexington? I love searching for books and records at the Friends Book Cellar at the [downtown public] library, the Peddler’s Mall and Pop’s Resale – basically any place that I can still be surprised by. I probably eat at County Club more than any other restaurant.
What’s a dream project? I’d like to make an abstract animated film at some point. I’d like to expand on what I have been doing with music videos for the past 10 years. Honestly, I’ve gotten to work with so many people I like I feel like I have already had a lot of dream projects.
Opening soon: “Cricket Press, John Lackey and Robert Beatty: Posters and Music Ephemera” ExhibitA number of Beatty’s gig posters will be on display as part of a new exhibit at the Living Arts & Science Center, opening Jan. 17 and on display through May 23. A Gallery Hop reception for the exhibit is planned for March 20.
Photo by Mick Jeffries