A local artist is not letting his autism stop him from creating thousands of digital vintage movie and video game posters.
Collin Stevens creates vintage posters of current day pop culture, movies, video games and commercial products under the moniker VintageWarhol on tumblr.
“It took me while to find my talent and my real talent is making vintage posters, because I really enjoy looking up vintage video game covers and album covers and movie posters from the 60s and 70s,” he said. “That’s where I came up with the idea.”
“There’s something about this vintage quality that gets me excited,” he continued. “Every time I watch a movie or see a TV show, it gives me an idea to make a vintage poster.”
His tumblr features over 1,800 posters and film stills done in the pop art style. The name VintageWarhol is an ode to the pop artist who Stevens described as “experimental and original,” and not always popular with his abstract creations, like an eight-hour continuously shot film of the Empire State Building.
Collins has also experimented with video, noting one he did in the style of a vintage carpet commercial. The short video on YouTube shows 2D objects falling and disappearing into a carpet to the sound of electronic psychedelic music. Stevens created both the animation and the music with his own chanting.
“A lot of my other videos on YouTube are way too experimental to be liked,” he said.
But Mad Men fans might like the mid-century modern aesthetic that is the basis for his posters. He also accepts requests for posters on his tumblr page.
As an artist living with autism, he encounters a lot of stigma from people who don’t know much about the condition and he asked them to accept him as he is.
But he noted there is also a stigma from within.
“People always think people who are disabled don’t have any skill,” he said, and that belief could deter those with autism from expressing themselves.
His message to them: “Be creative.”
His creativity, he explained, stems from alternative rock music that took elements from the past and reinterpreted it in a new way.
Growing up in the 1990s, he felt close to the era of the 60s and 70s when vintage graphic art and pop art were all over TV, magazines and advertising.
“People who are in a certain year, they tend to relive stuff they grew up with,” he said. “That’s why I came up with my vintage talents. Back when I was young, I grew up with everything vintage. I grew up with 60s cartoons like Spider-Man and Wonder Woman and Star Trek. Plus there were a lot of music videos and classic rock songs I played over and over.”
In 2004 he started looking up old movie posters and classic video game covers online but that didn’t become something he made himself until 2014. Now he can create one in a few hours. On his tumblr you can find vintage posters and film stills of Mean Girls, Ex Machina, The Last King of Scotland and James and the Giant Peach.
Stevens takes an image, adds font, borders and even follows the rating system used back in the 70s — aptly reciting the description of each rating by memory.
The Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts in Edmonton recognized Stevens for a song he produced at the centre. He received the Golden Record for Bubble Field Nine, a song he can use to control a synthesizer and technology sounds.
“Back in the late 60s hippies they tried to bring back stuff from the ancient times,” he said about his inspiration. “Kind of like today where hipsters try to bring back stuff that already exists.”
Stevens has been living in Westlock for the last 15 years, having graduated from R.F. Staples. He was born in 1988 at a Canadian hospital in Germany where his dad was stationed with the military. His family lived in Germany for four years before transferring to B.C. and later to Alberta and the Edmonton Garrison in 1996.
