Medium — Record sleeves
Album Covers.
1970s · 4 works
Four sleeves, and a decent spread of taste — a banjo record, Pete Seeger, and Bach's harpsichord concertos twice over. Filed with the illustration, alongside the paperbacks he was drawing the same decade.
By the 1970s Richard had been drawing professionally for a decade. Out of Pratt in 1964, into publishing, and then into a stretch where his work was going onto paperbacks by the dozen while he was art-directing at CBS alongside Lou Dorfsman. He was never interested in staying in one place for too long.
These four sleeves come out of that decade, and they are a nice argument for how wide his ear was. A banjo record and Pete Seeger on one hand; Bach's harpsichord concertos, twice, on the other. Whatever landed on his desk, the drawing treated it seriously.
He worked the way some people breathe — constantly, instinctively, with no separation between life and creation. Records were never the centre of that, but they are one more surface it reached, and the sleeves are worth standing in front of for a minute.
