Description
Magic As A Golden Mean. Costin Chioreanu has been creating album artwork for over a decade. He started out illustrating his band’s demos, but would soon be influenced by circumstances in post-Communist Romania, too. In the mid-1990s, metal fans in Bucharest were lucky to find bootleg cassettes with badly photocopied covers.
Undeterred, Costin simply made his own using Heavy Metal Magazine, the country’s sole heavy music publication, as a reference.
Today, he has emerged as one of the most talented artists in the realm of avant-metal and dark psychedelica, producing work for the likes of Darkthrone, Ulver, At The Gates, Triptykon, and Opeth. Whether the images he conjures are disturbing, provocative, or enchanting, they consistently show great finesse, sensitivity and depth.
Magic As A Golden Mean
Comments the artist himself:
“This is my first book, and it contains a fine selection of mixed media arts I made in the last years. After 12 years of working with bands, booking agencies, festivals, record labels, promoters, and studios, I realized the common denominator of the events in my creative life is indicating actually the golden mean.
Working with same passion and dedication for dark and light entities made me realize that I am always the one in the middle, and I will always need both sides in order to evolve to a higher state of understanding of the world around me.
So, the artwork selection was divided in three big chapters – one is related to darkness, one is related to light, while the closing one is related to magic and the middle path.
So, in my case, the ‘golden mean’ represents the magic of manifestation, the desirable middle between two extremes, marked by darkness and light.”
Magic As A Golden Mean
Costin Chioreanu bio + info on his studio:
TWILIGHT13MEDIA design studio was founded in 2003 by Costin Chioreanu after working deeply underground since 1999. This studio is dedicated exclusively to metal, dark art and this kind of culture.
What means “working deeply underground”? Well, I’m doing drawings since I was a little child and during my primary school and high school I was focused in fixing the cassettes covers from my collection, in a time when my country, “released” from the communist era was drowned in pirate stuff of any kind.
At that time I didn’t had any place from where I could brought original items, just these poor pirate-copies, with black and white (and sometimes color – but very poor quality) xerox-covers. That’s why, many years I did the job for myself and my collection.
Some years later I studied design and illustration at the National University Of Arts from Bucharest and since then I’m working with bands that are playing my favorite music.
The main difference between Twilight13media and other design studios or independent artists, focused on music product design is that here I can build up a old-school hand made graphic same as I can build a computer-made, photo manipulation – based graphic.
So, here you receive not only a beautiful paint that you’ll use for your front cover and after that you’ll be forced to spend more money on other designers to build up your booklet and so on. Here you receive everything complete, not just parts. Even we are talking about cd, vinyl , cassette or dvd cover or about promotional items like posters, printed-magazine adds, stickers and so on.
Recommended Book: Unfathom – Ronald Zieger
