Floodgate Companion - Robert Beatty

Floodgate Companion by Robert Beatty / ISBN 9781942801986 / 112-page hardback (foil-embossed cloth), 7.5 x 10.5 inches,published by Floating World Comics

A 50 Watts favorite from the beginning. 2024 reprint now in stock!

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Floodgate Companion is Robert Beatty’s debut monograph, a cosmic and immersive collection of artwork from the renowned album cover artist.

Robert Beatty is best known as the artist behind those drippy, trippy, technicolour sleeves donning your favorite albums by Tame Impala, The Weeknd, The Flaming Lips, Neon Indian, Oneohtrix Point Never, Mort Garson, Tim Heidecker, Kesha, Real Estate, and in illustrations for The New York Times, Surfer Magazine, The New Yorker, Jacobin, and Oxford American. Taking aesthetic cues from airbrushed cosmic album art and avant garde animation of decades past, Beatty updates the style utilizing an idiosyncratic combination of digital and hand drawn techniques resulting in a timeless feel.

Created alongside a vast body of album cover and illustration work over the span of several years, Floodgate Companion presents a parallel reality of unpublished artwork recalling the heyday of paperback science fiction, experimental animation, and outsider private-press psychedelic records. A cosmic and immersive artifact, Floodgate Companion is a gateway into a familiar yet alien world of imagined sci-fi novels and unheard music, shifting stylistically through airbrushed grotesques, abstract comics, and psychedelic op-art collages framed in asemic type.

"It's that sort of artwork which looks like it was never made by anyone, it simply exists in its own realm."--Paul Pope

"Airbrushed insanity."--Daniel Lopatin, Oneohtrix Point Never

"Like a time machine to another dimension, propelling you through a mental plane of the past and future all at once."--Sammy Harkham