sixtensplit wrote:I'm writing an article for my magazine SiX TeN SPLiT about Big Black's album The Hammer Party. No online or print source I've gone to has said who did the cover art for the album. Just by looking at it I would venture to guess the same person also did Bulldozer, Atomizer and Pigpile—by the liner notes of that album this would be a guy known as L.M. Owen. An exhausting google search had lead me to believe that L.M. owen is in th efederal witness program—he's just not there. If anyone has any info on him or can at least confirm that he illustrated The Hammer Party, please respond to this post. Thank you.
i answered this in a PM to this guy a long time ago but i never heard back. here is the answer:
l.m. owen is a woman named lisa marie owen, who i knew well during the late 80s and early 90s. she was a commercial artist. her mainline job had her doing lots of illustration work with industrial parts catalogs. but she was a stunningly talented caligrapher, type designer and sign artist.
she was trained in and worked exclusively with ink and paper. i have
never met a better type designer, let alone one with even remotely comparable hand/eye talent. for her, working with computers would have represented a giant step down. i make that statement even adjusting for modern software and interfaces.
in 1987 and 1991 i art-directed her for cover artwork for 7" records of bands i was in including the defoliants "hang ten" cover and buzzmuscle "assembler/33 degrees" (which was recorded by steve albini.) in my opinion, it was her logotype work that got my design into the cooper-hewitt national design museum / smithsonian in 1996.
see:
http://web.archive.org/web/200110252344 ... uzzmuscle/
when i met her, she was romantically involved with dave riley,
big black's bass player, living in chicago. she later maried my friend chris kreb and moved to new england.
i don't know if she still works as an artist, but if not, she has robbed the world of a supreme talent. i met her when i was 20 years old, and i laugh when i recall how i, in my youth and ignorance, supposed most people trained as an artist could at least sort of do what she did. not even close.
document her, please.
(edited to include a working link)
