FATHER FUTUREBACK / OBEY ARTIST SERIES
FATHER FUTUREBACK is an allround visual artist, beer enthousiast and lover of wild and adventurous music, hailing from The Hague, the Netherlands. Tattoo designs, drawings of absurdist landscapes, several one-man bands, posters, book design… anything goes for his ongoing quest for the unboring. For the OBEY Artist Series, Futureback designed 3 prints, all referring to his favorite classic rock jams.
For this video, Father gave us a glance into a regular day of his life. Below this portrait I asked him some questions about him being an artist.
FALL 2015 ARTIST SERIES : FATHER FUTUREBACK from OBEY CLOTHING on Vimeo.
Describe what a regular day of work looks like.
I wake up between 6 & 7 in the morning to work as a janitor at a window-brothel. I clean the place up and make sure the ladies of fun can have a proper day of working there. I recently made a promotion there, I’m know also the doorman. Whenever the ladies bring in early customers they can see me chilling in the kitchen drawing stuff or reading the newspaper, kool vibes for sure.
I get home between 10 & 11, check my mail have some oats and coffee. Than I go out for a run outside or to the gym.
By now I’ve got everything planned mentally… so I when I get home I take a shower and I’m ready to go. I work at home and play records and around 5 I open up a beer and start cooking. I’ll have diner with my favourite titperson and after that I will work some more or read some stuff, watch a movie. During all of this I’m enjoying me some delicious craft beers. It stimulates my creativity and it helps me not to OD on life itself.
I also work at RED LIGHT RADIO in Amsterdam, I help the bosses out in the office and have been doing my ‘BRAIN FRIED’ radioshow there for over 4 years now. Red Light Radio is killer… it attracts all these music-obsessed kRaAaZeEe guys that enjoy a good beverage and conversation, that place is the best and I’m glad I’m working there as well.
What role does music play in your work and life overall?
I play music the whole day, I’m obsessed, There is just so much killer stuff out there and it NEVER STOPS! I’ve been into heavy jams since forever, was into Sabbath when I was only 10 and during my high school years I was deep into metal. This was pre-internet so I was ordering by putting money in envelopes and stuff, sending letters to bands and labels. Later I started skateboarding and with that came the magazines and VHS videotapes. All those soundtracks had cool punk/hardcore and indie stuff on it so that was a whole new interesting world for me to dive in. One day someone gave me a VHS of ‘Streets On Fire’ and that’s how I got into all these SST bands like Black Flag, Descendents, Minutemen etc. Those times were so exciting… living a carefree life while skateboarding and listening to killer music all the time.
Also I’ve always loved going to concerts, having a beer with my boys, seeing killer shows, kool!
Nowadays there’s so much music I like, I’ve worked at a recordstore for 8 years and that place introduced me to so much new stuff… like all those weird music from way back when, freejazz, electronic stuff… My collections is becoming massive now, like over 6000 lp’s and new stuff is coming in every day, it’s insane!
Because your work is always filled with humor, do you feel people don’t take you seriously?
I’m sure there are plenty of people that don’t like me/my work but that’s fine.. if they can’t see past
some stuff than it’s just not for them. That has kind of changed over the years.. when I just finished art school I wanted everybody to like what I do but of course… while apllying for jobs people would get freaked out by me and my work.
Now I don’t care as much, I just like to have fun and share it with people and luckily there are still enough people who like what I do.
But yeah, there’s humor in my work but sometimes here’s also literature, poetry, art history and even politics in it, you just have to take a closer look.
Humor in visual work is a delicate thing I believe… you have to be careful with it. Female humor in art is the worst.
Name five works of art that inspire you.
THE JEFF HANNEMAN DEMO’S. Jeff is insane, he wrote THE most killer Slayer songs and I’ve always liked him the most on pictures and live. There’s this bootleg lp with Jeff playing everything by himself and it’s insane! It’s one of the best things I’ve ever heard!
MIKKELLER and OMNIPOLLO: Both Scandinavian craft beer breweries with a really kool art direction. Their beers are really interesting as well.. experimental but also with lots of respect for the ancient craft and classic beer styles. Creative stuff and delicious too.
KARL OVE KNAUSGARD: This guy is dissecting himself with his ‘My Struggle’ project. It’s so ambitious and well executed, unreal and addictive reading.
It’s hard for me to name just a few artists since I’m into so much different stuff.. Here’s some names of people/movements I really like: DER BLAUE REITER, JOE COLEMAN, BERT NEUTINK, PARRA, RAFAEL ROZENDAAL,PAUL WACKERS, GUIDO RICHERS.
How do you feel about mixing art with clothing?
For my artist series I really wanted it to have a classic bandshirt feeling so I took a few of my favourite classic heavy jams and made a simple and direct design for it.
Come to the OBEY pop-up store at August 28th to celebrate the release of the Artist Series and drink a beer with father himself.
