Last week I visited Pleasant Plains Workshop in Washington, DC where I had a wonderful time interviewing print makers Anthony Dihle and Kristina Bilonick. Read on about Anthony’s early creative influences and check back next week for my interview with Kristina.

Anthony Dihle, Fire Studio

Anthony operates Fire Studio from Pleasant Plains and has screen printed concert posters for local and internationally known bands such as Greenland, Exit Clov, Elvis Costello and Jay-Z. He was raised in a 1970’s subdivision of Frederick, Maryland where he and his younger brother would make art together: We would sit down with huge pieces of paper and draw things like floor plans of gigantic houses. We would say “Can you imagine the greatest house in the world?” and on these great big sheets of computer paper from the 1980’s with the perforated holes on the sides we would indulge in these floor plans and say “This is the movie theater, this is the swimming pool, this is the go-cart track”.

Since Anthony makes posters for concerts, I asked him about typography. Here is a photograph of a needlepoint which hung above the living room sofa. A lot of times I would lay on the couch and stare at the numbers, each one was done in a colorful and different way. My grandmother, who was from Sweden, made a lot of oil paintings of landscapes and Viking ships. They were very strong works of art and she did not have any formal training. My brother and I would sit around her kitchen table make drawings. She would love that we were being creative and she would stick our drawings on the fridge.

Anthony Dihle, landscape painting of a house

still image from the movie Watership Down, 1978

We talked about cartoons that caught Anthony’s attention – older cartoons like Merrie Melodies which were produced with more color and detail were always more interesting. My dad showed us more serious animation which was not jokey or cartoony at all but more a serious take on a series of novels, like Lord of the Rings, Watership Down, The Rats of NIMH. They were all dark and there were characters dying with animals drawn in a realistic way. They would go to war with each other which was dark and sort of delicious in its own weird way.

Anthony Dihle, Camper

Fortunately Anthony had a chance to travel often as a child, camping in places like National Volcanic Park in Northern California to see bubbling sulfur pits, or visiting the Giant Redwood Forest, the Sierra mountain range or Death Valley with its “huge expanses of desolation and bright sunlight. Or we would go to the beaches and see Big Sur with gigantic pillars of earth coming out from the bare sand.”

I asked Anthony whether these places had any sort of effect on his current printed images and here is his very interesting remark: Something I have been getting in tune with more is a sense of scale in art – I think scale is something people don’t talk about as much in good work as they do with color or technique. But I think good designers are very in sync with a sense of scale, using the drama of scale to create an emphasis on something and I do think that is something you see in the natural world. Etchings from 200 years ago would show tiny people next to a gigantic waterfall. If you look at posters now there can be a huge image with a tiny piece of text at the bottom to generate this sense of importance in what they are promoting.

Anthony Dihle, poster for Elvis Costello and the Sugarcanes

So how about that young, creative boy? Did the people, places and things in his childhood affect the way he works today? I think getting to do imaginative work comes from the same impulse you have at a very young age. Just wrapping up the the storefront display for the Monster show was very creative work, I had not done anything three dimensional in years.

Pleasant Plains Workshop window for Monsters, 2011

Trio, silkscreen print

one serious squeegee

See more of Anthony Dihle’s deliciously weird work at Fire Studio.