Style Imitating Art | “Atom Heart Mother” by Hipgnosis

About Style Imitating Art

Style Imitating Art is hosted by Salazar of 14 Shades of Grey, Shelbee of Shelbee on the Edge, and Marsha of Marsha in the Middle. Style Imitating Art challenges us to draw style inspiration from pieces of art. Every other Monday, one of the hosts, acting as presenter, selects an inspiration image that they will each post on their blogs. The following Monday, each host shares her art inspired outfit. Participants are invited to submit their art inspired outfits to the presenter by 10:00 p.m. EST on the Tuesday following the hosts’ art inspired outfit posts. The following day, Wednesday, the presenter will share all of the submissions on her blog.

You don’t have to be a blogger to join either! In fact, you don’t even have to join but you can still use the art to inspire an outfit just for the sake of trying something different. If you want to share your inspired outfit, we invite you do so on Instagram or any other social media platform that you prefer. Just be sure to tag Salazar, Shelbee, or Marsha or use #TeamLOTSStyle and #StyleImitatingArt so the hosts know you have joined. Go have some fun in your closets and join the SIA challenge next week!

This Week’s Presenter

It was my turn to choose the inspiration for this round and I took a different direction from our normal artistic avenues. My husband and I recently watched the Netflix documentary, Squaring the Circle: The Story of Hipgnosis, which details the career of the art design team that created some of the most iconic album covers in music history. 

Album cover art along with band tour posters are often underrated in the world of contemporary art, yet these artists offer some of the most fascinating perspectives. I think when music is the foundation from which the art manifests, it adds an extra layer of creativity to the mix, resulting in unique and memorable works of art. 

So I decided I wanted to feature an iconic album cover by Hipgnosis for this round of Style Imitating Art. 

The Artwork

“Atom Heart Mother” by Hipgnosis

About the Artist: Hipgnosis

Hipgnosis was an English art design team based in London during the late 1960s through the early 1980s. They specialized in album cover art for some of the most popular rock bands and musicians of the era. Their commissions included work for Pink Floyd, Def Leppard, Black Sabbath, Bad Company, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Paul McCartney, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, and Styx. You are probably already familiar with some of their most iconic album covers including Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, and AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.

Hipgnosis was formed in 1968 by Cambridge natives Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell when they were approached by their friends in Pink Floyd and asked to design the album cover for their second album, A Saucerful of Secrets. Being film and art school students at the Royal College of Art in London, Thorgerson and Powell were able to use the university’s darkroom until they completed school. After that, they set up a small darkroom in Powell’s bathroom but shortly after, they rented space and built a studio at 6 Denmark Street in London’s West End.

The design duo derived their name, Hipgnosis, from graffiti that was on the door to their apartment. Thorgerson said they liked the word for its pun on “hypnosis” as well as its ability to create “a nice sense of contradiction, of an impossible co-existence, from Hip = new, cool, and groovy, and Gnostic, relating to ancient learning.”

In 1973, Hipgnosis designed the cover for Pink Floyd’s eighth studio album, The Dark Side of the Moon, which launched them into international prominence. The record became one of biggest selling and longest charting albums of all time, and along with it, the prism cover art has been hailed as one of the best album covers of all time.

Due to the success of The Dark Side of the Moon, Hipgnosis became a highly sought after design team for some of the biggest names in the music industry. In 1974, they brought in Peter Christopherson as an assistant, later promoting him to full partner. Until their dissolution in 1983, the firm employed many assistants, freelance designers, and illustrators. The team never had a set fee for designing album covers. Instead, they asked the artists to “pay what they thought it was worth.” According to Thorgerson, this payment policy sometimes backfired.

Hipgnosis’s approach to album cover design was heavily photography oriented to which they applied many innovative visual techniques by elaborately manipulating photos through darkroom tricks, airbrushing, and cut and paste techniques. Their style of photo manipulation was actually the predecessor to photoshopping.

Many of the album covers produced by Hipgnosis are known for their quirky humor and their use of puns and double meanings. While the team became famous for such quirkiness, their sense of humor once angered Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin to the point that they almost lost the band as a client.

Peter Christopherson died in his sleep on November 25, 2010, at the age of 55. The cause of death was never revealed. Storm Thorgerson passed away at the age of 69 on April 18, 2013, from an undisclosed form of cancer. Aubrey Powell is still producing artwork within the music industry. He is 77 years young.

About the Art: Atom Heart Mother Album Cover

Then original album cover features a Holstein-Friesian cow standing in a pasture with no text or any other clue as to what might be on the record. The concept of a random cow photo was Hipgnosis’s reaction to the psychedelic space rock imagery often associated with Pink Floyd at the time. The band wanted to explore different genres of music without being limited to a particular style or image so they requested “something plain” for the album cover of Atom Heart Mother.

Inspired by Andy Warhol‘s cow wallpaper, Thorgerson drove to a rural area near Potters Bar and photographed the first cow that he spotted. The cow’s owner identified this particular bovine as “Lulubelle III”. More photographs of cows appear on the back cover and the inside gatefold, again with no text or titles. According to Thorgerson, he believes that “the cow represents, in terms of the Pink Floyd, part of their humour, which I think is often underestimated or just unwritten about.” It is this weird sense of humor that has attracted me to this album cover!

The original album cover artwork is a 12 x 12″ (30.5 x 30.5 cm) lithograph which is housed at the MoMA but currently not on view.

References/Resources:

• Hipgnosis: Wikipedia
• Atom Heart Mother: Wikipedia
• MoMA: Album cover for Pink Floyd, Atom Heart Mother
• Squaring the Circle: The Story of Hipgnosis
• The Hipgnosis Album Cover Gallery
• HIPGNOSIS – Storm Thorgerson, Aubrey Powell and beyond
• HIPGNOSIS-A Brief History
• Rolling Stone: Hipgnosis’ Life in 15 Album Covers: Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and More

About My Outfit

My outfit started with the bag. I found this cow print handbag a few years ago on a thrifting adventure and I couldn’t resist it. I love the tote style and the fun animal print so I built my outfit around the bag.

I wanted to represent the green grassy pasture as well as the blue sky in my outfit so I reached for this old green cotton high-low dress and topped it with a blue tie dye shirt that always reminds me of the sky. Because the inspiration is the random image of a cow, I added some other random animal elements with a elephant necklace and leopard earrings. Of course, cowgirl boots and hat were no-brainers for this cow inspiration. I topped it off with a blue jacket because it’s still really cold outside.

I absolutely love the way this outfit came together and I will definitely wear it some place special one of these days!

If you want to be featured with your art inspired outfit in my gallery post on Wednesday, February 28, 2024, be sure to submit your photos to me at shelbeeontheedge@gmail.com by 10:00 p.m. EST on Tuesday, February 27, 2024. 

Happy styling, my friends!

Keeping it on the edge, 

Shelbee

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