Wed, May 22, 2013

Celebrate music and art at Cafe Nomad

Jan 10, 2013 12:00 am
Photo: Brenda Melhus

Phil Rose


Photo:

Caroline Rose


NORWAY — Come celebrate Music, Art and The New Year. Cafe Nomad is currently featuring the art of Phil Rose. He has created a series of pieces for his daughter’s new CD "America Religious." Come in and see them any time this month, they are both beautiful and very interesting.

After earning a BFA degree in drawing and printmaking from the University of Tennessee, Phil Rose began his career as an illustrator/cartoonist for the Louisville Courier-Journal. He went on to get his masters in printmaking and painting from Indiana University.

In 1981, Phil moved to New York City where he continued his career in both printmaking and illustration. He taught lithography at Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in Manhattan and illustration at Mason-Gross School of Art at Rutgers University. His illustrations appeared in Time Magazine, the New York Times and the New York Daily News. By 1989, he began designing book covers for Dell Publishing, a division of Random House, and worked his way up the ranks to Art Director/Vice President. In 1999, he moved to Hyperion Publishing, a Disney company, to head their Cover Art Department as Creative Director. Some of his best-known cover designs include "The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch, "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" by Mitch Albom, "Out of Sight" by Elmore Leonard, "The Horse Whisperer" by Nicholas Evans, "Bad as I Wanna Be" by Dennis Rodman, "Lucky Man" and "Always Looking Up" by Michael J. Fox. He retired from publishing in 2012.

Phil has come full circle and rejuvenated his love for printmaking with the print series he created to illustrate the 12 songs on the soon-to-be-released CD, "America Religious," by his daughter, Caroline Rose. This idea of marrying hand-cut stencils and spray paint was born out of a lecture/workshop he gave at Rhode Island School of Design this past fall.

On January 11 at 7 p.m., Caroline will be performing her new music with Jer Coons at Café Nomad. She will have as her special guests that evening Magne and Erika Melhus. Please join in for a wonderful evening of acoustic music with friends and neighbors.

America Religious is a 12-track collection of stories and poetry set against a gritty landscape of Roots-inspired Rock, Americana, Folk, Gospel, and Rhythm & Blues. Caroline Rose and partner Jer Coons cover all elements from production and recording to mixing and engineering, as well as playing nearly all the instruments themselves (lap steel, cello, organ, mandolin, and drums to name a few). The duo arranged and recorded America Religious at Coons’ Park Hill Studio in Burlington, Vermont.

Rose’s songwriting stands on its own in the ground covered by the likes of Townes Van Zandt, Joni Mitchell, and John Prine. America Religious covers an array of topics ranging from current political issues to honest, sometimes heartbreaking self-realizations. The songs of America Religious reflect years of travel, happenstance meetings with strangers, and conversations with old friends and distant relatives. More than simply words set to music, they evoke feelings of familiar stories and long-forgotten memories.

Copyright 2013 Sun Media Group