Cover art
The cover art of the band's two studio albums is striking, contributing significantly to the overall 'package'. In both cases the covers draw from existing sources The Wrong People uses a constructed photograph by the Scottish artist Calum Colvin. Food, Sex & Paranoia uses one of Piero Fornasetti's Tema e Variazioni plates - part of a 350-strong series built around a single found portrait. It's interesting to note that Furniture seemed reluctant to use their own images in artwork, another example of them swimming against the tide.
The Wrong People (Stiff, 1986)
Calum Colvin is a Scottish artist whose style involves taking a roomful of objects and painting a design on them so that when seen from one particular viewpoint it appears to form a flat image. However, when seen from any other viewpoint the illusion is broken. Colvin then takes photographs of the room from the particular viewpoint that preserves the illusion and exhibits the photograph. This means that at first glance the viewer thinks they see a flat image and then picks out the details that reveal the scene is three dimensional. The Wrong People sleeve uses “Cupid & Psyche 1986”, one such constructed photograph.
Colvin made a bespoke piece for “Love Your Shoes”. The style is very clearly similar to that of TWP, giving the band a strong identity.
Food, Sex & Paranoia (Arista, 1990)
The Fornasetti image is a stylised portrait of the Italian soprano Lina Cavalieri, a face Piero Fornasetti reportedly encountered in a nineteenth-century magazine and then used, obsessively, as the motif for more than 350 variations on a single porcelain plate. The Tema e Variazioni series ran from 1952. The plate on the Furniture sleeve is one of the most widely reproduced variants.