Poster art by Punchgut

FM Symphony loves Punchgut

By Julie Guggemos
Contributing Writer

Linda Coates, executive director of the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony, said she is working to increase visibility and accessibility to the F-M Symphony’s music.
To accomplish this, Coates has commissioned local artist Punchgut to add modern artistry to the symphony’s promotional posters.
“I really wanted to give it a whole new essence,” Coates said.
The artist/designer Punchgut said he works with concert and performance organizers when an act he enjoys comes to town. Sometimes he’ll ask if the band would like him to design their show poster. The process works both ways, Punchgut said. Performers track him down as well, as happened with the F-M Symphony.
The name Punchgut started out as the artist’s studio’s name. When people began to recognize his work from the studio, they would remember the unique name.
“Then people would ask for that ‘Punchgut guy,’” he said.
The name stuck.
Punchgut said working as an artist and a designer is something he has always wanted to do.
“It’s the only thing I think that I’m halfway good at,” he said with a modest voice.
Punchgut’s website includes a gallery of past promotional posters for the Kings of Leon, the Avett Brothers, Andrew Bird, The Fray, David Sedaris, The Killers, Avenged Sevenfold, John Legend, Steve-O, BB King and the Fargo Film Festival. Coates knew of Punchgut’s work, and wanted him to do work for the F-M Symphony.
To understand why Punchgut was brought in to design the posters for the FM Symphony, you must first understand the symphony’s project, what type of shows Punchgut is helping to advertise.
Coates’s original commissioning of Punchgut began in the fall with this year’s chamber series. Chamber music is a small ensemble version of the FM symphony. This format draws from musicians in the orchestra to form a brass quintet, woodwind quintet, string quartet or piano trio. The performances are more informal, and play a vast repertoire of selections including everything from jazz and rock to international music.
“I was making assumptions that chamber music audience would be a smaller subset of symphony audience in general,” Coates said, “[that] maybe they had more elite tastes.”
A coworker in Coates’s office pointed out that newcomers enjoy the chamber music better than the massive symphony. The chamber had shorter pieces. Musicians talked to the audience during the show. The overall feel is more personal. This realization made Coates change her marketing strategy.
“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. We’ve been approaching this from the wrong direction,” Coates remembered.
Coates now recognizes chamber music as an access point. The form can show a novice music audience what the FM Symphony offers, as college students, and other younger people would have interest in the form.
Coates said she was aware of Punchgut’s fine art and posters, so she gave him a call and they had lunch to talk about him working with the symphony. Coates’s aim was to tell Punchgut what symphony and chamber was, what the symphony would be performing, then to put the design freedom in his hands. She told him to “do whatever” in creating the chamber series posters.
“And he just went off and created this incredible image,” Coates said.
Punchgut’s work, both his fine art and his promotional posters contains an amazing array of styles, Coates said. The image created for the chamber series was also amazing, she said, and it had several different color combinations for different shows in the series.
Punchgut was again commissioned to design the posters for the final Masterworks concert titled “Masterworks V: The Splendor of Russia.”
“If you’ve never been to a concert before,” Coates said, “this would be a good one to start with.”
Three Russian composers will be featured. The first half of the concert contains a variety of colorful pieces including “Overture to Colas Breugnon” by Dmitry Kabalevsky. Expect fast percussion, and syncopation. It’s a splashy piece, Coates said. As noted in the FM Symphony’s program notes by John Miller, director of the Division of Fine Arts at NDSU, “The ‘Overture’ itself is a short but sparkling showpiece that is remarkably at home in the stylistic company of ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Harry Potter.’
The second half features the film score/suite from Sergei Eisenstein’s classic 1938 film “Alexander Nevsky.”  According to Miller, composer Sergei Prokofiev sparked the American film industry’s attention in 1938 during a concert tour. “[Prokofiev] returned to Moscow and became interested in Eisenstein’s upcoming film depicting Alexander Nevsky, a 13th-Century Russian nobleman and his peasant army’s unlikely defeat of an invading Germanic army.”
According to Coates, the “Alexander Nevsky” is the most successful film score ever, and it had great influence on John Williams. 
“It’s just a massive piece,” she said.
Coates again consulted Punchgut and commissioned him to do an illustration for the piece.
Coates found a CD cover image to show Punchgut at a second meeting. It had red coloring and a man in a red helmet. Punchgut loved the Soviet-era collectivist art styling. The original design was altered to fit the Masterwork concert’s piece, because it needed a more Medieval appearance, more Lord of the Rings. Punchgut took the piece in a completely different direction to fit the needs of the Symphony.
“At first I was thinking, ‘This might look more like a heavy metal/rock image,’” Punchgut said.
But then he worked with it, kept at it, and he got an image both he and the F-M Symphony was happy with.
“The imagery had been very fun to work with to put a new spin on it,” Punchgut said.
The final poster features the Viking figure in armor with a beaten samurai sword. He stands with his body pointed toward a purple/red sunset; his neck is craned and he looks over his shoulder to look at the poster viewer. A spiral horn is tethered to his hip under a red sash belt. His face is darkened behind a metal helmet with horns arcing out the crown. One red eye is visible. The shredded tail of his clothing and the wisps of black hair under the helmet flounder in the wind.
Coates said working with Punchgut made her feel that he cared about the Symphony’s intentions with the poster.
“He really wanted to put across what we were trying to say,” Coates said.
When Coates went to pick up the posters from the printer, she said there was a problem: The prints were so good they were going to disappear off the streets.

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IF YOU GO:
FM Symphony: The Splendor of Russia
When: Sat. April 16 at 8 p.m., Sun. April 17 at 2 p.m.
Where: NDSU Festival Concert Hall
Tickets: $25-28 adults, $12-15 student http://www.fmsymphony.org