Meet the artist behind the 'morphing Prince' GIF
by Luke Taylor
October 04, 2016
At first, Sarah Marks didn't want to admit she was a Prince fan. When Marks was in her early teens, a cousin came to stay with her for the summer. "She was this huge Prince fan," Marks recalls. "It was sort of annoying — she wouldn't stop about him, and she was playing his records constantly."
But something happened over the course of that summer: Marks got really attached to the music she was hearing. "I didn't want to give my cousin the satisfaction of being right," Marks laughs, "so after she left, I went and bought the records that she had."
Now, to this day, Marks says she continues listening to Prince regularly; the 1979 album Prince is one of her favorites. "I listen to at least something off that record probably once a week," Marks says.
"I started creating it the day he passed away," Marks says. "I think most artists process grief through their art; I think it's a more natural process that way."
The GIF encapsulates 18 different artistic phases throughout Prince's career, capturing the way Prince presented himself visually. Marks says she got the idea for the GIF when she was looking at photos of Prince after he passed away. "I found a picture of him the year his first album came out, which was '78," Marks says. "He had the wonderful '70s afro, and he's wearing this fantastic wide-collar leather jacket. He's just looking so cool, you know? … That's when I got inspired."
Adding more poignancy to Prince's passing was the fact Marks had lost her father just 20 days earlier. "[My father] was a particular eccentric," Marks says fondly. "He used to wear these crazy hats all the time. … He didn't care what people said or how they looked at him. And that is one of the things I really love about Prince is that he had this style and he didn't care what direction it went. It was just what he wanted to do at that time and he did it."
After sending her tweet, Marks received a few emails from other Prince fans who appreciated seeing her artwork. "I think I just kind of gathered all of the horribleness of 2016 and decided to make something lovely and cheerful that would make people happy," she says, "and it ended up making me happy."
Marks says her visual art is often inspired by music and by the musicians who create it. "Artists who inspire me tend to be people who do exactly what their voice is telling them to do," she says. "It seems such a natural progression for them, and it's wonderful to watch it. I think that is how Prince would inspire me; he just had all these different styles and he has this wonderful sense of himself."
A visual artist who inspires Marks is the late Howard Finster — who, among many other works, painted album covers for artists such as R.E.M. and Talking Heads; it is because of Finster that Marks used the words "keep making sacred art" in her tweet. "It's very resonant with me that art, any art, any sort of creative endeavor, comes from a place that we don't always know where it's coming from," Marks says, "and so I think that it's important to kind of embrace that.
"I think that's the way that you become a person like Prince or strive to be a person like Prince, which is you listen to that voice and go with your inclination," Marks continues. "And the voice that's talking to you: that's the smartest voice you have. And it's a sacred voice."
The full conversation with Sarah Marks is an episode of the Prince Remembered podcast; you can download the episode here.