In 2021, John accepted a commission to design a cover for Matt O’Hare’s album Shiloh.

There were several other preliminary variants, which, looking back on them now, are interesting and weird, but which also wouldn’t work so well online: just too crunchy, too graphically complex. But I’ll share them here. They were built from images from Shiloh, the place, the battlefield, and other archival materials provided by O’Hare. Yes, they don’t look like much at this scale… Which is why we went with the final.

While I thought of simply scanning a work-on-paper, I didn’t want the scan to be the work, whereas a composite or digitally “built” thing is native to the final output. This exists nowhere but as the cover.

Here’s the layer organization: