Behind the scenes in choosing Take’s first cover, featuring artist Eben Kling’s journey to capture “New England’s new culture”
From the beginning, publisher Michael Kusek knew he wanted New England artists to create original art for the covers of Take. The question was who to get for the premiere issue. One answer —the September issue features three different covers — was Connecticut artist Eben Kling.
Happily, Kling quickly said yes to this project despite the obvious limitations: The magazine didn’t actually exist yet except in Kusek’s mind. “The prompt I was given was New England’s new culture (Take’s tagline),” he says. “The scope of that was so big that I really struggled with it. It was hard to hone in on any one pointed thing.”
Kling says he relied on his experience as an illustrator to come up with several sketches for review. “I worked with imagery that seemed thematically appropriate—autumnal, it being the September issue and all that.
“It was hinging on an aesthetic,” he adds. “I wanted to make something that looked beautiful, which is not typically a priority for me. I wanted it to be conventionally eye-catching, conventionally attractive and still have a tinge of something, still have it relate to my previous work, which is a little unhinged and a little odd.”
Kling says he was self-conscious about what he would provide. “It was hard for me to work with the prompt,” he says, noting he didn’t know what the other cover artists were doing. “I was not sure what part of the survey I was providing.”
The good news is Kling provided exactly what Kusek was looking for. “Eben creates richly complex work that, whether small-scale or large, grabs the viewer and draws them in,” he says. “Having a cover that jumped out from the newsstand was vital for our very first issue, and we all knew he would be the one to create that for us.”
