Flatlife Friday: Dan Macadam

Each week, CPC's very own Flat Phil takes you snooping through the drawers and other hidden places to discover gorgeous work by gallery artists that you can buy. Flat Phil (with his trusty sidekick, Art Purchase) has an enviable ability to slip inside narrow spaces unnoticed, and when he found these gazillion-layered screen prints by the maestro DAN MACADAM himself, well, he just about lost his high tops...Enjoy.

Since 1995, Dan MacAdam has operated under the name Crosshair, a mainstay of Chicago's world-renowned community of printmakers and poster artists. In addition to hundreds of poster and album cover art commissioned for well-known musical artists, Crosshair produces Dan's own screenprinted fine art editions. His work draws upon original photography and a unique approach to the silkscreen process in order to produce Crosshair's distinctively detailed, immersive prints, which dismiss the graphic legacy of the psychedelic era in favor of a dreamlike realism. We're big fans over here at CPC, and we're constantly blown away by Dan's ultra nerdy mastery of his medium. Who else pulls an entire run of a 13th layer just to add a tiny red dot to a print?

"I am drawn to photography and make technically rigorous, photorealistic screen prints as a means of creating images which draw the viewer into three-dimensional spaces. Through my work, I seek to explore the boundaries and tensions between the human-built and natural worlds, where I find rhythms, textures and atmospheres analogous to those occurring in music. My prints frequently portray structures and landscapes in transitional states, transformed by growth, decay and shifting context to new forms, at a remove from their intended function." 

- Dan Macadam

Top Image: Pressure, 13-color screen print, 23 x 23 inches, $100