For Justin Bergo, drawing and a fascination with monsters and spooky themes go hand in hand, so when Surly Brewing Company asked the Mankato-based artist to design its monster-themed labels for Darkness, a seasonal Russian imperial stout released annually around Halloween, it was a match made in heaven.
“It’s exactly my aesthetic,” Bergo said. “It’s dark monsters, dark art and creature oriented. The exposure is great and they’re a cool company based out of Minnesota. I couldn’t be happier to work with them.”
Michael Berglund, creative director for the Minneapolis-based Surly, said the company’s president and founder, Omar Ansari, came up with the idea of hiring a new artist each year to design the labels for the limited-edition beer back in 2007.
“Omar had this idea to engage with local artists to create some of the labels for the beers,” Berglund said. “Darkness was being released around Halloween, and it’s very dark, so we went with this theme of a monster on the bottle. So, every year, Darkness has been a different artist. It’s part of Surly’s long-standing tradition of supporting artists.”
Justin Bergo submitted four drawings, including the two above, to Surly Brewing Company in February. He was selected to create monster-themed art for the Surly Darkness label, which will be released later this year.
Each year, the company puts out a call on social media for artists to submit a portfolio of their past work, along with a statement explaining why they want the job. This year about 70 applicants responded. In previous years that number has been as high as 130.
Berglund said the submissions are narrowed down to a top 10 list and then passed around the company to determine who to select. He said Bergo’s portfolio and statement stood out from the pack right away.
“Justin had this flair for dramatic composition,” Berglund said. “He had really detailed line work and he also sent us some badass monsters that showed us his dark imagination was really vivid.”
Bergo said his combined interest in visual art and monsters all came to a headway one summer when he was about 8 years old while visiting his uncle and aunt in Des Moines, Iowa, for a couple of weeks. His uncle, Rick Swan, was an author and game designer for TSR Inc., the publishing company for the popular game Dungeons and Dragons.
“He would review games for Dungeon Magazine,” Bergo said. “He had a game room that was lined with games. I was so taken in by all these books.”
He found himself spending hours every day in the game room looking at all the illustrations of creatures and monsters for the games. When his mom came to pick him up two weeks later, she had trouble pulling him away, so Swan gave his nephew two large compendiums of monster manuals for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons to take home with him.
Mankato-based visual artist Justin Bergo has been fascinated with monster-themed art since childhood. He submitted the above image to Surly Brewing Company, which hired him to design something similar for the company’s Darkness label.
“They had these black and white images and these beautiful colors,” Bergo said. “When I got home, I just started drawing. I had tracing paper and would draw the box and trace the creatures in it.”
The following year his older teenage brother brought home some “Teenage Mutant Nina Turtles” books from Gen Com, an annual gaming convention.
“Those books, along with the monster manuals, I was just sold from there on out,” Bergo said. “I was constantly drawing in school.”
His interests evolved later in his teens, but he continued drawing and making art. As a young adult, he again found himself gravitating to monster-themed drawings and sketches.
“I’ve been really concentrating on making art and monsters since my early 20s,” he said.
He vividly remembers sampling Surly Darkness about a decade ago and was struck by the art on the label. He was already a fan of some of the past Surly Darkness artists, including friend and fellow artist Adam Martin, who designed the Darkness label in 2016 and encouraged him to apply this year, along with another 20 friends and fellow artists.
Surly Brewing Company hires a new artist each year to design the label for their seasonal Darkness beer, a Russian imperial stout.
“It’s been a big dream of his to be involved,” Berglund said. “It’s his favorite beer and those kinds of things really do also help to tip the scales because we know that not only is their artwork going to be featured, but they have an emotional connection in participating with a beer that’s got some meaning to them.”
He’ll be doing three projects for the company — three different labels for three variations of the beer. The original Darkness will be released in October, followed by a barrel-aged and flavor-infused variation in the months following the initial release.
“Mike said to start thinking about monsters and I was like, ‘I’m always thinking about monsters,’” Bergo laughed.
“For art direction it was, ‘We’re going to leave this up to you, you’re the artist,’” he said. “It’s going to be three colors, red, white and black, and it’s got to have a goblet somewhere.”
Bergo finished some initial sketches for the labels this week to send to Berglund and will then begin developing one of those monster creations in greater detail when he gets the green light from Surly.
“They’re going to pick what composition they want from those and then I’m going to start in earnest working on that composition,” he said.
When it’s released later this year, his monster-themed labels will be featured on tens of thousands of bottles distributed across Minnesota and 13 other states.
“I’m excited to represent Mankato,” Bergo said. “I graduated from MSU and it’s a cool thing to have a little bit of skin in the game for a product that a lot of people around here love.”
March 14, 2021 at 03:30PM
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Mankato artist tapped to design beer labels for Surly Brewing Company - Mankato Free Press
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