Five Questions with Steve Keene

Why did you accept the invitation to design the Fall 2023 edition of All-Story?
I accepted the invitation because it’s fun for me to see my work in print. It’s removed from how I see it in the studio, and gives me another way of thinking about it. I have done a few album covers for bands in the past, and it’s always wild to see your work in a different context. I mass-produce my art. My work is like a pretend magazine, going out over the world—there are over 300,000 of my paintings out there so far.

Were there any surprises in the design process?
Very few times in life you get to do exactly what you want while working with someone else—that is the surprise. This process was a real collaboration. I gave the editors and graphic designer a mountain of artwork and some strategies. They had to sink or swim with my process of overabundance. The goal was to surprise all of us.

Any challenges?
No.

Might you offer any advice to future designers?
Try to pretend you don’t know what a magazine looks like, and see what happens.

What’s inspiring you of late? 

Visual:
Last summer, at the Morgan Library in Manhattan, there was a show of preparatory drawings by Bridget Riley for her paintings. The paintings are so perfect that I don’t know how to enter them, but the studies had all these markings and measurements and thoughts noted all over. You could see the travels she went on to get to that perfection.

Musical:
Every year, when the New York City Marathon starts, the local classical radio station [WQXR] plays all nine Beethoven symphonies in a row, lasting about six hours. It turns things that you think you know into something different.

Textual:
I am reading a book called Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency—art criticism by Olivia Laing. Most of the time, I think that stuff is boring, but I really like this. One of my daughters is making me read Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. It’s kinda sad.

Photo: Lila Barth