While the Homegrown Music Festival is certainly an audio-dominated arts festival, there has been at least one visual component to it every year: The Field Guide. This year, one local artist got a chance to depict what Duluth is to them.
Linnaea Borealis Rose is a local watercolorist and instructor at the Duluth Art Institute. They say that the Homegrown organizers reached out pretty late in the process to see if they would be available.
"Their artist had unfortunately fallen through, so they reached out to me and said 'Hey, you've got some time: Are you interested in doing the cover for Homegrown this year?" said Rose. "And of course I was like, 'Yeah, absolutely. I would totally do that.'"
They had roughly a month to complete the work - a short amount of time for an artist doing commission work. After looking at past covers, they stuck to their roots, choosing to do the cover in watercolor with a little bit of pen.
While the style of the cover represents Duluth, Rose said that they actually based the rooster on a very specific non-Duluthian.
"I was modeling this actually after Alan-a-Dale from the Disney Robin Hood movie. And I thought, 'how can I make this rooster a hipster?' And I just kind of thought of the Duluth vibe. And accidently, it seemed like the rooster kind of looked like the local artist Ross Thorn." That fortuitous coincidence seems to be leading to a collaboration for one of Thorn's album covers.
You can hear Community Connection every Tuesday and Thursday at 8am on Northland Morning.
