Friends of badknees #1 Sweatshirt - Matte Fish

Welcome to the friends of badknees Series, a series in which I put my friends’ art on shirts because my friends do cool stuff and you should know about them.

Friend #1 in this series Matte Cathcart. I befriended Matte back in 1998, my freshman year at Indiana University. We spent a good amount of time together for four years, being roomies, playing music together, cooking pasta and drinking giant sodas. Matte was always involved in multiple music projects during those years and continues to be - see Nana Grizol and Nihilist Cheerleader. He not only introduced me to all sorts of great new music - he was also the one who introduced me to screen printing, making his own shirts and albums in amazing DIY ways. All of my earliest badknees creations were created using methods I saw Matte use - making your own frames, stretching your own fabric, using copy machines for transparencies, etc. 

Matte’s art has always been a source of inspiration for me. I’ve always loved his lettering and collage work and drawings. His album artwork is some of my favorite out there.

Back in 2019 I spent a few days with Matte and our friend Nick and we played some music and caught up on life as life moves quick and a good decade passed since we saw one another. While staying with Matte, he showed us an assortment of wooden fish he carved and painted. I forget how many he had and the story behind what got him making fish, but they were so great. He let us each take one and it’s one of my favorite wall hangings ever. It currently resides at badknees at the bottom of the stairs.

The irony in this first friends of badknees shirt, is that it’s the first shirt I’m selling that I haven’t screen printed. You see, I bought a fancy heat press machine late last year and was wanting a multicolored image that I could test out to print. I’d been wanting to screen print this fish for a while, and I still might, but I wanted a shirt with those exact colors, that exact fish. So I did it. And here it is.

A screen printed transfer on a very soft unisex fleece sweatshirt. Get them while they last. Going to cut Matte in on half the profits because that’s how this friends of badknees thing works.