Personally, I’ve always been intrigued by the way Frank Ocean chooses to express his artistry beyond music and I wanted to look deeper into the possible meanings behind this piece of album art. Unfortunately, I’m not formally trained in composition theory, and I’ve never even analyzed art before. Deprived of any formal techniques, I decided to get creative and explore this myself by staring at the cover while I listened to the album multiple times through.
Composition wise, this piece is fairly straightforward. Immediately the listener is met with the album’s title in bold vintage font, a picture of frank, a barcode and the parental advisory sticker all placed on an off white textured background. The simplistic layout seems very deliberate, a theme that he has used on many of his releases since The Lonny Breaux Collection (2011)
The title font, as discovered by reddit user rafasdfgh is actually the very common Futura SH Bold with the tops of some of the letters shaved to make curves. The custom edit to the font embodies a spacey and retro tone to match the atmospheric sounds on the album. Even the closing track for the album “Futura Free” shares part of its name with the font, and provides a great example of these transcendental rhythms.
There are nuanced details in the composition of the central picture that tell a deeper story that seems to go along with the music on the album. Frank is positioned away from the camera, with his hand covering his face, a seemingly candid pose. The light illuminating Frank’s left side paints the photograph with harsh shadows, revealing the apparent darkness of the space he is in. Uniform white tiles form the backdrop are reminiscent of bathroom or shower walls, a reflective and private space for some people. The light clashing with the darker environment brings out a full range of colors, and we notice more subtle features of Frank’s upper body, such as the water droplets and his chest tattoo. As the light interrupts the predominantly dark atmosphere, we get the sense that Frank is being interrupted. Whether the hand in front of his face is an initial reaction to the bright light or an unwelcome photograph, this portion of the piece gives us the sense that we are bursting in on an intimate moment. Frank, an obviously more quiet figure due to his periods of absence away from mainstream media, composes a visual of himself being disturbed to pair with an album of atmospheric self-reflective ballads.
Another piece of evidence that adds to the theme of interruption is the aspect ratio of the center photo. My initial measurements brought me to 14.9:9.9 which is very close to the 4:3 aspect ratio of most mobile phones in portrait mode. Compromise between these two measurements is 14:9, a common aspect ratio used to compose an acceptable image for 4:3 images to present on larger screens.
While there are more details to the piece that I haven’t quite fit into a central theme, the green hair being one of the best examples, I think Frank’s visual art is meant to be more of a personal creative expression than any sort of commentary. Fans like me can hypothesize and theorize all we want, but in the case of reclusive artists like Frank, we might never know the real meanings behind these pieces.
But in the end, what do I know? I’m not an art critic.
