Portland-based artist Matt Schumacher provided the illustration and animation for our most recent collaborative LP: We Must Believe in Spring. Featuring English producer Psalm Trees (who lives in Rotterdam) and French guitarist Guillaume Muschalle (who lives in Paris), WMBIS was fully created without the two musicians having met. They don’t even speak the same language and yet, through the internet, they were album to make an album.
Honing in on these concepts of collaboration and URL vs. IRL, I spoke with Schumacher over Zoom about his creative process with this album, his preparation for working remotely, finding his signature voice, and more. He provided a one-of-one print version of the album cover (which we will be giving away to a listener soon) and you can watch the full process (in real time) below.
[neonpajamas]: To start, I think we can begin with how our situation is similar to Psalm Trees and Guillaume: I interviewed you back in March of 2014 for my blog and we have never met in person (or on screen until now) yet we were able to collaborate and connect online. Can you speak on digital connections that you’ve made and projects that have resulted in that?
Matt Schumacher: I kind of have a lot of experience working with people in other countries. Different time zones and languages. A couple previous graphic design jobs, one of them, half the team was in Mexico, and for another one, half the team was in Vietnam. It felt comfortable to me, actually. It felt normal to work virtually while people were starting their day and mine was ending.
I like being set off on my own. To touch base, go off and do my thing, and reconvene. That’s how I work most naturally, so it’s been well-suited to me.
It’s nice because this sort of communication before COVID would have been a sort of after-thought. One nice aspect is we’re all collectively figuring out how to communicate remotely. It’s felt really nice to have some energy put in to this sort of communication. Collectively, we had all these tools to do what we’re doing now. It’s been like a kick in the pants to make us all really figure out how to work with it.
WMBIS: initial sketch development
Along with your digital network, there’s also the sense of local. Do you see these two – the local and the global – as being different or connected? Do you see different senses of community?
The real world feeds the online presence more than the other way around. Any bump in followers I’ve had in social media can always be attributed to something I did in the real world.
We Must Believe in Spring is collaborative in style, and while you handled the art on your own, I wanted to hear you speak a bit on collaboration, working with structures/restrictions/guidelines and still making it your own.
The main difference for me with a passion project vs. a client project is that if I do a personal project and go off on a tangent, I can follow the tangent, but if I’m working with you guys, for example, and there’s a set direction and I think it might be interesting to go a certain way, I can’t go that way because you guys will be like, “What is this?”
That’s always been the main challenge – that I can’t really follow my whims in the same way, so over the years, that’s the thing I’ve had to reconcile with the most.
WMBIS: process drafts
There are many freelance artists who have eclectic styles and can mold to meet the needs of their client, yet with your work, I feel that
people come to you because they want your style. How did you find
your (for lack of a better word) “voice” and what keeps you returning
to this world of homes and neighborhoods and nature?
A big shift was when I started switching to ink washes rather than doing things digitally. A couple of years ago, I started trying to draw moods rather than actual subjects. That’s probably why I like drawing houses. They are full of meaning already. You can put them in any setting and they’re like when tofu takes on the flavor of whatever it’s made with. If there’s a cloudy sky, you subconsciously think something different about the house. I like that aspect of domestic scenes.
WMBIS: vinyl
In closing, do you have any advice on artists working on their craft / or perhaps advice on how to get your name out their and develop an online presence?
The more I’m interacting with the real world, the better I feel about my virtual presence.
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[If you’ve made it all the way to this interview feature, be sure to stay tuned for a chance to win this one-of-one print above. We’ll be giving it away once the We Must Believe in Spring documentary is out in the world, which is sooner than later. I’ve said too much…]