Ziggy Marley Collaborates with Local Artist on Original Designs

[caption id="attachment_75270" align="alignnone" width="1000"] A design by Sag Harbor artist David Diskin.[/caption]

By Michelle Trauring

“Lost am I in my memories of my forefathers' legacy

I am one of you, you are one of me.” – Ziggy Marley, “Shalom Salaam”

It was everything David Diskin had imagined — chill, easy, positive, and simultaneously nerve-wracking, sitting across from Ziggy Marley backstage at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center.

In that moment, Marley was no longer an unreachable musical giant, born into a dynasty that shaped cultural history.

He was Diskin’s new business partner.

Over the last 10 months, the musician and visual artist collaborated on a series of original designs inspired by Marley’s “We Are The People” tour. Each canvas illustrates the message behind the music, rooted in Diskin’s longtime love of reggae and Marley’s language of peace, love and unity — a language that Diskin said he deeply understands.

[caption id="attachment_75272" align="alignright" width="431"] David Diskin[/caption]

“For me, working with Ziggy, it’s a big part of my spiritual, creative life — being connected to that,” Diskin said. “So the fact that this project came to us and I was doing it, it was kind of like a miracle. Like, ‘Wow, that was cool.’”

He laughed to himself. “You can’t believe it.”

The Western Canada native is a lifelong artist — self-taught and multi-disciplinary. He moved to New York in 1992 and out to the East End four years later, where he established his studio gallery and printing service, Modern Digital Canvas, first in Bridgehampton and now in Sag Harbor, the village he has called home since 2001.

While his forte lies in abstract art, Diskin is also a songwriter proficient on guitar, piano and drums — “I don’t really draw lines between one kind of art and another. If you’ve got a creative soul, you have a hard time narrowing it down,” he said — and has always felt a pull toward reggae music.

“I’m 53, but I started listening to Bob Marley music back in the late ’70s, early ’80s, and it’s been a huge part of my creative life,” Diskin said. “I’ve always been connected to the universal notions in Bob Marley music, which is ‘one love,’ notions of peace, notions of spiritual, mystic expression that Bob Marley really expressed through all the metaphors of the ghetto and Jamaica culture.

“Ziggy has picked up the same notion, the universal notion of love,” he continued. “I work mostly in abstract art, so to me, with color and form, I’m always working on some mystical subtext of those things. I’ve always been connected to that message, that spiritual message.”

With a common understanding, language and bond, Diskin and Marley got to work, collaborating on a dozen prints that they narrowed down to three. The visual artist created the image, which he passed to the musician, who assigned the lyrics — settling on “I am one of you/You are one of me,” “Just love,” and “Love is my religion.”

“If you ever ask Ziggy, ‘What’s your religion?’ he’ll just say, ‘Well, it’s just love.’ And he says that a lot in his shows,” Diskin said. “So that came out of the show experience and going to a show and seeing it, and seeing how that energy is, and putting it together.”

It is a message that both artists feel is particularly poignant right now, Diskin said.

“We’re in this time of great turmoil, great uncertainty, so I think there’s an urgency to restate the message of unity, love and peace as much as possible,” Diskin said. “I definitely get that sense from Ziggy — that this is an urgent message to the world right now. We need to be more together than apart. To me, that’s the real essence of the Marley music, that ‘one love,’ despite everyone having different viewpoints on things. We’re not going to be very happy unless we get along.”

Now available for purchase, the Ziggy Marley collaboration marks the first of what could be many, Diskin said, though he was mum on the details.

“It’s going to take off in the next year; we have other collaborations in the works,” he said. “This is the first one we’ve done, but we have some other artists we’ll be working with fairly shortly. Ziggy was a really great person to start it off with, and hopefully we’ll expand the collection and do more things, and keep it going.”

The inaugural Ziggy Marley Lion Art Collection, in collaboration with artist David Diskin, will be available for a limited time in a variety of sizes and configurations. For more information, visit ziggymarley.com and md-canvas.com.