Fittingly, old haunts surround a couple of skeletons on the cover of Motif’s Halloween issue, as designed by digital artist Matthew Bernier of Barrington. They are the names of businesses now gone: Goldy Records, Chez Pascal, and The Watershed, to name a few.
“Some of these places were my haunts when I was growing up,” Bernier recalls. “It gives a Rhode Island theme to the cover, which has a skeleton wearing an old newspaper hat teasing the other one.” A carved pumpkin sits on a copy of the Providence Phoenix, which ceased publication over a decade ago. “R.I.P.rovidence” banner indeed.
“My basic idea was to incorporate businesses that don’t exist anymore. Places people remember. Some have been gone for a few years, others haven’t been there for thirty-plus years,” he explains.
You can call it a ghost town of departed shops and stores.
On that morbid note, one of Bernier’s favorite authors is Edward Gorey. He particularly likes The Gashlycrumb Tinies, which is an ominous alphabet book of twenty-six kids who met untimely ends. “My humor is a little dark,” says the father of two sons.
Bernier loves the old- school Addams Family single-panel cartoons in The New Yorker, as well as the 1960s TV show starring Carolyn Jones and John Astin. On a lighter note, he’s also drawn to picture books by Leo Lionni, like Swimmy or Frederick.
Remembering Halloween’s past, Bernier says his favorite treat was Twix. Instead of buying a regular costume with a plastic mask from a store, he’d “use whatever was lying around the house” to make his own outfit before venturing out.
“I was a Ghostbuster once,” he recalls. “My backpack was a big shoebox with a vacuum cleaner hose sticking out of it.” He drew the Ghostbusters logo on the back of his pack.
He was always drawing in the basement of the Cumberland house he grew up in. “I’ve been drawing forever,” he adds. And he especially enjoyed copying the logos of rock groups like Van Halen and Def Leppard.
An interest in branding has stayed with him to this day. Bernier has worked at a local garden center for twenty years, focusing on brand identity and experience. He’s responsible for graphic design, displays, and buying. “It’s a lot of computer work, and a little bit of hammer work,” he says.
Bernier graduated in 2005 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Graphic Design from UMass Dartmouth. He designs greeting cards and sells them via Instagram: @brokenparachutecards.
In creating his digital collages, Bernier starts on his iPad, then transfers the images to his computer. He likes to scan real textures of paint into the work as well. “It adds to the digital design,” he says. Bernier tends to “move things around a lot” in the composition.
“I’ve been getting a lot more enjoyment out of it this year,” the digital artist adds. “I feel lucky I can continue to do it.”
Called the World Wide Web at the time, the internet started to become available to the broader public during his teenage years. “In high school, I took a photography class in which we had to develop black-and-white film in the darkroom. And then ten years later, everything was digital,” he remarks.
So for Bernier, art has been a mix of the physical and the digital.
“It works for me,” as he puts it.
The artist doesn’t call himself a fan of horror. “I suffer from intense nightmares,” he says, adding he particularly dislikes the slasher flicks of the genre.
Still, in doing the Halloween cover, Bernier says he hopes his digital collage “brings back all of the memories of growing up that you might have forgotten over the years.”
Especially the old haunts you used to hang out at.
Bernier’s art can be viewed on Insta @matthew.c.bernier