“You need to go to shows where you don’t know the band,” Stacie Willoughby says over tea on a rainy Santa Cruz day. As I think about the meaning of her words, she sits back, takes a sip of her peach tea and adds, “It’s good for you.”
It’s the advice of a woman who understands the importance of creativity, a woman who, through her poster art, has almost single-handedly created the visual identity for a thriving live-music community.
If you’ve been in or around the Bay Area psych/rock/neo-folk/noise music scene anytime in the last decade, you have almost certainly encountered Willoughby’s work. In a time of minimal, computer-generated fliers, her posters stand apart as hand-drawn, wildly detailed and imaginative treasures.
While Willoughby’s work is often compared to that of psychedelic poster artists of the 1960s and ‘70s, such as Stanley Mouse and Victor Moscoso, it contains aspects of many different visual and cultural movements including the anything-can-happen world of surrealism, the curves and perspectives of Art Nouveau, the storytelling and other-worldliness of mythology, the spirit-imbued nature of animism and the inner-becomes-outer world of mysticism. Her images are perhaps best described as a subconscious reflection of everything that Willoughby has experienced: life, death, memory, love, suffering, creation and joy all swirling around the same space. “People automatically compare my stuff to the ‘60s,” she says. “But if you look at it, I think it’s really different. It’s just that there’s no language for poster art.”
Willoughby has produced a steady stream of posters for shows ranging from small, last-minute house shows to huge, multi-day festivals in the forest and everything in between. The scope of her portfolio is mind-boggling; page after page of posters, announcing performances by some of the most interesting and cred-heavy artists around, including Will Oldham, Fleet Foxes, Stephen Malkmus, Bert Jansch, Sleepy Sun, Mudhoney, Black Francis and Animal Collective; and that’s just scratching the surface. Willoughby is, quite literally, identifying, furthering and documenting an era of music.
And she’s doing it all by hand from her bedroom, one show at a time. “I sit in my chair with a board on my lap and just have at it,” she says of her technique. She used to pencil, ink and then color her posters, but rarely does so anymore, and when asked how much in advance she plans out her drawings, she responds, “Not at all.” Willoughby is in the enviable position of being able to let her creativity and vision guide the image. “I’ve been really lucky,” she says, “because I don’t generally get assigned images. I usually just start.” In fact, having a pre-conceived notion of what an image needs to be takes her out of her comfort zone. “When I have something that I know it has to end up as, it’s terrifying,” she says, “because I don’t know what it’s going to end up as.”
When Willoughby, 27, started designing flyers and posters for shows in 2003, it was because there was an obvious need. “My first posters were for house shows in Santa Cruz,” she says, “because we didn’t have any way to get the word out. The Internet wasn’t that important yet, and people would just scrawl the name of bands on paper.” But Willoughby saw that posters could be great vehicles for spreading the word. “I like to draw,” she says, “and I was interested in conveying the information in the most eye-catching way possible.” So she started making posters for local bands like Residual Echoes, Loyal Sons and Daughters, Frog Eyes and Comets on Fire, and the more she made, the more in-demand her talents became. “People wanted me to do it and I wanted to do it and I got to be a part of something that was fun,” she says. She adds, reminiscing about the DIY freedom of the house shows, “It was all about making a situation that you could exhibit your art without other people OK-ing it.”
Drawing Boom
Meanwhile, down in Big Sur, a music lover named Britt Govea had started putting on shows under the name (((folkYEAH!))) and needed a poster artist. When Willoughby, who had developed a reputation for creating engaging and eerily beautiful drawings, met Govea in 2006, a new chapter in her poster-making story began.
“I just lucked out,” she says. “It was a situation of being in the right place at the right time.” Govea was quietly promoting shows and creating a community around indie, freak-folk and psychedelic-rock music, and he started calling on Willoughby to provide the posters for his events.
Govea is quick to send praise Willoughby’s way. “Her work is always fresh,” he says. “It has wonderful elements of the macabre and both the usual and unusual…and [has] given the (((folkYEAH!))) series a unique and progressive visual distinction.” He explains that every poster she has ever done for him is like a birthday or Christmas present. “I open an email attachment from her and this bold, wondrous glimpse into her ultra-vivid world is revealed to me,” he says. Then he adds, “Blessed I am to have her work attached to these shows.”
What began as a trickle of shows turned into a stream, and as (((folkYEAH!))) grew, so did the connection between Willoughby’s art and great shows. A Willoughby poster can be spotted across the room and will most certainly catch the eye of any music lover in the know, as Govea has presented an incomparable parade of amazing, somewhat under-the-radar artists and created a community around the music that he loves. As Willoughby says, “Britt wanted to create an environment that he wanted to be in.”
Willoughby’s posters provided the invitation to join this emerging scene and the spirit of creativity and independence that it represented, and as (((folkYEAH!))) was gaining momentum and attention, so too were Willoughby and her posters. Over the years, she has provided most of the visual element of (((folkYEAH!))).
The more recognizable Willoughby’s art became, the more jobs she was offered, and what started with flyers for local shows has gone worldwide. “I mostly work in the San Francisco to Los Angeles region,” she says, “but I’ve done art for English bands, Ukrainian bands, French bands, Japanese bands, Australian fashion designers—it’s definitely reaching across an ocean and connecting to other people.”
She’s also officially made it off the street and onto the gallery wall. This month Willoughby’s work shows at the Candystore Collective in San Francisco in an exhibit that runs through Dec. 2; that day a second show titled Archaic Revival, with Willoughby and rock poster artists Alan Forbes and David D’Andrea, opens at the Space Gallery on Polk Street, also in the city. And on Feb. 4 here in Santa Cruz, Idle Hands on Pacific Avenue mounts a Willoughby show that’s yet to be titled.
As for the wave of handmade posters that has emerged in the wake of Willoughby’s success? “I’m always stoked when someone is making an artistic rock poster,” she says. “Things used to be made by hand; you could feel that a person made [a] sign and I just don’t feel that from all the signs and advertisements that I see.”
Willoughby, whose art has promoted and celebrated bands from around the world and helped weave a community of music lovers together, sees posters as an essential element of live music. And at this point, her own posters lend a great deal of credibility to artists and act as beacons for shows that are worth checking out, even if you don’t know the band. “Posters generate excitement and give visuals to a sound,” she says, “which is always exponential in its return.”
STACIE WILLOUGHBY’s ‘Notes From Below—The Posters of Stacie Willoughby’ shows through Thursday, Dec. 2 at the Candystore Collective, 3153 16th St., San Francisco. 415.887.7637. Find more of her work on Facebook.
A version of this article first appeared on IsGreaterThan.net.
