The Doomed Bird of Providence have had the good fortune to engage with some incredible visual artists over time. The art provides an interpretation of the music visually and offers insights into the sound that reflect the unique perspectives of these artists.
WILL EVER PRAY – Paul Loudon
Paul Loudon is a freelance illustrator/graphic artist with a comic book style of drawing. It was perfect for the first album given it was very much a bunch of stories put to music. Paul took bits and pieces from the song lyrics and created the wonderful images on the cover. There was a lot of discussion involved in putting it together and Paul was pretty patient in hindsight. It was a great start and the packaging, very much pushed by Front & Follow’s Justin Watson, had a real attention to detail that made for a release we were very proud of.
BLIND MOUTHS EAT – Peter Aldrich
Peter Aldrich is a Melbourne visual artist that Mark Kluzek had known for some time. He had already provided artwork for a Doomed Bird single. Mark worked with Peter to explore some of the central themes of the album which resulted in the above image. The album was, for the most part, more violent and darker in tone. And the album artwork (as well as the insert artwork Peter provided) captured something of the tone of the album.
BURROWED INTO THE SOFT SKY – Peter Aldrich
The third album was a significant departure from the first two albums. It is comprised of two extended instrumentals. It was the first time the band used graphic scores to create the pieces. With this in mind the search was made for more abstract work that reflected the tone and nature of the music. Mark spotted Peter Aldrich’s 2017 series The Cloud of Witness and thought a work from this would be the ideal image to capture something of the feel of the title track.
A FLIGHT ACROSS ARNHEM LAND – Judi Dransfield Kuepper
The fourth album was again another shift in style. Mark Kluzek took newspaper reports from the early 1900s and used these to create the songs, letting the flow of the sentences create loose song structures. As Mark was a huge fan of the artwork on Laughing Clowns and Ed Kuepper’s releases, he contacted Judi Dransfield Kuepper who had created most of the art/photography for these releases. Judi worked up a few different ideas, all of which were great, but the final choice captured of the title track’s atmosphere in a wonderful way. In additon to this, Judi created a cover for the single of the album, Ransoms For Cars.
METEORIC HERALDS OF DANGER – Peter Aldrich
This release was inspired early on by minimalist music like Steve Reich as well as work like Instrumentals by Arthur Russell where fairly involved scores were used that enabled improvisation but also included specific melodies and chord progressions. It was also, thematically, an attempt to go full circle. It uses Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life as its key inspiration as well as an image that appears on the first Doomed Bird EP. This image, Triumphal Arch for the Duke of Edinburgh, New Wharf, Hobart, 1868, has always played a part in how the band has presented itself. Mark Kluzek created a variation of this photo for the design but was looking for stylized, strange versions of the characters in the photo, possibly how someone like great artist/author Norman Lyndsay might render them. Mark was able to get Peter Aldrich to draft these and in the end they were used on the front and back of the album to great effect.
The Doomed Bird of Providence 
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