PLAGUE YEAR (2)

By: Rick Pinchera
January 24, 2021

We are delighted to present PLAGUE YEAR, a curated selection of HILOBROW friend Rick Pinchera’s drawings — which were posted to Instagram over the course of 2020.

For a closer look, click on image.

WFH — March 17

It seems to be the consensus that March 13, 2020 was the day that shit got real. It also happened to be my wedding anniversary. (Awesome.) A few days later I posted this response to the new normal, at least for those of us lucky enough to be considered non-essential and who could work at home. I would riff on the Van Halen logo — something I drew on brown paper book covers hundreds of times as a teen. I had been doing some goofy mashups of ’80s metal band logos and Boston neighborhoods for a while at this point, starting with Rozzy (Roslindale) as the Ozzy logo, which proved to be amusing to a few people. I outran the suburban teen a long time ago, but classic rock bands like Van Halen beckon me back periodically. (Eddie’s death later in the year was a 2020 kick in the crotch that seemed especially cruel.)

WFH, of course, is the shorthand for Working From Home that you might see on a company calendar or shift schedule. It probably took me less than an hour to make — and, before you knew it, it was on a tshirt and I was making money off the pandemic. Hooray!

I knew I couldn’t keep the money, so this was the first of several projects that allowed me to make some donations to places that needed it. Institutions were struggling, livelihoods were disappearing and people were dying. Yet there was still some capacity to joke about it. Surely this wouldn’t last too long.

I wouldn’t make this shirt now. The pandemic was never really funny but back then but there was a genuine feeling of “we’re all in this together,” however fleeting. My WFH logo seemed to make people happy at the time — a simple idea from the beginning of a very complicated year.

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PLAGUE YEAR (2)

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