"Cover Band" piece for Gallery 1988

I finished this piece today for the "Cover Band" show at Gallery 1988, which opens October 7th. It's a group show with about 60 artists, each of whom got to pick their 10 favorite album covers from the Rolling Stone Magazine’s Top 500 Albums of All Time. From those ten options, the gallery sent out one original cover to each artists for use as a canvas... basically making it into a sort of collaboration. I luckily got one of my top 3 -- the self-titled Led Zeppelin album with the burning Hindenburgh -- and wanted to try to keep as much of the original art as possible. Thankfully there was a lot of white space!

My attempt was to take this iconic, tragic image, and give it a different feel. More like a cute "whoops" rather than a horrific "oh the humanity". If it's just a little girl's balloon catching fire it's not quite so dramatic, is it? Well, maybe she'd be more freaked out if she knew there were people in there. Also, I wanted to do something that had nothing to do with the actual songs or the band, since I felt that would be... well, almost an insult to the original cover. It's such a perfect cover for that album, I would never presume to make a better or more poignant version.

- t