Becca Fuhrman is no stranger to painting through the lens of music. “When I was really little,” the artist says, “my mom was our art room teacher. She did this exercise where she was playing different songs on the radio, and she gave each little kid in the class a roll of receipt paper. Our task was to use a pen to draw a single line and translate the feeling of that song into the line.”
While the rest of the class was befuddled, wondering why they were engaging in conceptual exercises instead of just coloring with crayons, Fuhrman was blown away. “Even though I was really little, it clicked, being able to translate the feeling of something visually,” she says. “Ever since then, I've been pursuing that in different forms, whether it's architecture, graphic design, or painting.”
If you’ve walked around the city, chances are you’ve run into Fuhrman’s work. Ever since she relocated from her hometown of Boise and ditched a potential career in architecture, she’s been working full-time both as a fine artist and freelancer. Though she finds it difficult to put her style into words, the aesthetic throughlines are clear: bodies in motion, shapes defined not by linework but by their contrasting colors, sunny hues and earth tones coexisting harmoniously. Her subjects, typically elongated femme figures suspended against an ornamental background or reposing poolside, could exist just as easily on a Greek amphora as in a 1960s magazine ad.
While Fuhrman produces work for all types of clients, from locals bars to Bumbershoot, she’s especially drawn to musicians and the facets of their craft that demand a good visual. Visuals, after all, can make or break a musician in the social media era. On apps, visuals are everything. A good show poster gets butts in venue seats, and a good album cover can make the sale. Fuhrman’s style does just this, as evidenced by her work with musicians (Scott Yoder, Vinta, Small Paul, Sylvie) as well as venues (Linda’s Tavern, Sunset Tavern, Conor Byrne, Tractor Tavern, The Fillmore, and the occasional Seattle Theatre Group production). As for album covers, Fuhrman has done two recently: Dean Johnson’s Nothing For Me, Please and Wild Powwers’s Pop Hits and Total Bummers Vol. 5.
Fuhrman met Dean Johnson, member of folk band The Sons of Rainier, while helping refurbish the Sunset Tavern during the COVID pandemic. “They were spending a lot of time revamping while they were closed, and I had a lot of downtime,” she says. Fuhrman ended up painting the venue’s new bathrooms and installing wallpaper she’d designed in their green room. It was while running errands at Al’s Tavern in Wallingford with the Sunset’s manager that she was introduced to Johnson, who commissioned her to make art for both his band and his solo project soon after.
According to Fuhrman, the sparse portrait of Johnson on Nothing For Me, Please—his beanie-bound head cast in cool pastels like an Easter egg—was part of a process that involved a vigorous exchange of ideas.
“It was Dean’s first album, so we traded a lot of ideas as to what it would look like,” she says. Johnson was particularly excited about the possibility of a cover that might reflect the unique markings on the ceiling of Al’s, where the two had first met. Though a ceiling cameo didn’t make the final cut for the cover, Fuhrman repurposed the design in a poster created for the album’s release show. The end result pleased both parties, so much so that Fuhrman has already completed the cover for Johnson’s next project, to be announced later this year. “It’s another kind of departure,” she says coyly.
By comparison, Fuhrman has been a friend to the members of Wild Powwers for far longer. Fuhrman met drummer Lupe Flores almost a decade ago, and she immediately became a fan of the band. That friendship led to her designing the cover for Wild Powwers’s latest record, which the band envisioned as a play on the art of the legendary new-age compilation album Pure Moods. The irony, of course, is that the two albums sound absolutely nothing alike, a dissonance that Fuhrman took and ran with. Pure Moods’s anodyne rainbow of hallucinatory shapes and saturated colors perfectly suits music made to blend into the background. The raucous deconstruction that graces Pop Hits and Total Bummers Vol. 5, meanwhile, is equally appropriate; in Fuhrman’s interpolation, soft colors become sharp and riotous, and the once-foregrounded nature now orbits a central humanoid character in the midst of an active psychedelic awakening.
No matter the project, it’s important to Fuhrman that she immerses herself in the sound she aims to illustrate, harkening back to the very first time she realized her capacity to make art, armed with nothing but one thin line and an invisible wave of sound.
MUSIC SPOTLIGHT explores collaborations between Seattle musicians and visual artists. Presented in collaboration with Sonic Guild Seattle - supporting music creation and performance in our community.
