About Space March
Space March is the creative identity of Australian artist, designer and musician – Craig Simmons. Through the Space March identity, the various creative disciplines are stitched together by music. Not only is Space March a musical recording act producing songs and albums, but Simmons’ design work has been specialised in the music industry for his entire working career. To complete the musically connected creative trilogy, in 2010, Simmons began to explore the visualisation of his songs to fine art images with the Monumental Album + Art Project.
When Simmons produced the music for his 3rd Space March album Monumental, he had the idea to create unique artworks for each song on the album as a visual interpretation of the song. Simmons’ conceptual lyrics seemed to lend themselves to abstract and/or symbolic visualisation. His music is fundamentally about ideas and emotions and so too is his art.
The Early Years
Although it took till 2011 for Simmons to professionally focus on visual art, it is in fact the oldest of his creative disciplines. Simmons’ interest in fine art began in his childhood. The son of an artist and art teacher (Yvonne Cleaver), Simmons was exposed to the creative process from an early age. The Art Gallery of NSW became like a second childhood home and comic books were substituted with books on Modern Art. By the time Simmons had reached high school, he had developed a knowledge and passion for 20th century art. He began by exploring Abstract Expressionism in his early high school years but became quite influenced by 60s Pop Art in his later schooling.
University Studies
With a strong desire to create artwork for music, Simmons chose to study a Bachelor of Design with a major in Visual Communications at the University of Technology, Sydney with a view to working as a creative in the music industry post study. A budding synthpop musician, Simmons’ Honours year major work was a visual identity for his then music project. At the same time, Simmons chose Geometric Systems of Proportioning as his research project. His thesis was key in developing an ongoing interest in geometry in art and design.
Simmons studied design at a point in history (1989 – 1992) where technology was fundamentally changing the way graphic designers worked – what would later become the desktop publishing revolution. Simmons whole-heartedly embraced using computers as part of the design process and in particular, became the university’s leading Photoshop expert tutoring and demonstrating its capabilities. Simmons attained a distinction for both his major work and research project and graduated from his Design Degree with first class honours. He was also taught by several notable artists including Peter Powditch and Rosemary Laing.
Graphic Designer
In 1992, whilst in his final year of studies, Simmons began working at Sony Music in their Art Department and was offered a fulltime role on completion of his studies. Simmons worked closely with the the ARIA award-winning Art Director, Kevin Wilkins on a variety of Australian artist album covers, designing and illustrating for artists such as Midnight Oil and Jon Stevens. Simmons was soon promoted to Senior Designer and as his interest in 90s dance/electronica grew, he became the logical choice of designer to take charge of Sony’s dance music division’s creative, working closely with label heads John Ferris (Dancepool) and Andrew Penhallow (Volition). Simmons’ dance music design output was prolific producing countless CD single, album and 12” Vinyl sleeve designs, as well as numerous compilations such as the successful Strictly Techno series. During this period Simmons designed for: FSOM, The Lord’s Garden, Single Gun Theory, Infusion, Itch-E and Scratch-E, The Big Day Out – Boiler Room, Jestofunk, Sunscream and many other 90s dance music artists.
Digital Designer & Creative Director
By 1997, Simmons had migrated from print design to web design establishing and heading-up Sony Music Online in Australia. Over the following years, Simmons designed the Sony Music web site and many artist web sites. As the department grew, he moved more into an art direction role overseeing a number of web designers and developers produce literally hundreds of artist and music web sites. In 2007, as Online & Creative Director for Sony Music Australia, Simmons conceptualised and architected the unique bandit.fm music download site for Sony Music which became of global interest to the corporation. Simmons also personally contributed to the design of the site – its functionality, user interface and ‘look & feel’ as well as being the creative director and development project lead overseeing a large team of designers, illustrators, programmers and web developers. bandit.fm was a visually rich site and was recognised as being an artistically compelling music site.
Abstract Painter
In 1999 Simmons started producing curvilinear paintings – artworks based on circle geometry but rendered by hand with a compass, brush and acrylic paint. A curvilinear shape is a continuous curved form oscillating the positive and negative spaces in an intriguing manner. The curvilinear form is still a fascination for Simmons and even appears in an applied fashion in the 2011 song artworks “Shadows” and “Eye For An Eye”.
View Geometric Art >
Graphic Portraits
In the early 2000s, Simmons was one of the early adopters of giclée canvas printing (digital output to canvas for fine art purposes). He produced a series of graphic portraits of friend April Gadd that stirred his interest in the technique. Throughout the 2000s, Simmons continued to experiment with these graphic portraits with some employing hand rendered paint work onto the print. Simmons worked from his own photographs for these portraits such as the Natalie Bassingthwaighte series which were artworks based on photos Simmons had photographed of the pop star when shooting b-roll on video shoots. Ultimately, Simmons’ desire to produce many more graphic style art prints led to the acquisition of his own high-end large format printer in late 2010. His objective here was to be free to experiment with the medium as well as control all aspects of the process to ensure the highest quality prints for the recipients of his artwork.
View Portraits >
Song Artworks
Through Space March, Simmons is now poised to launch his visual art career with his collection of 12 song artworks for the Monumental album available as limited edition giclée canvas prints. Simmons is also committed to the notion of producing an artwork with each new song he writes in a concurrent fashion for a true multi-disciplinary cross-pollination of ideas.
