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August 13, 2022
Culture

An over-cooked cover concept

Winter is almost over, but our 40 Under 40 winter print edition is still out on streets. Learn more about Emmaline Zanelli and Kurt Bosecke's burnt pizza cover concept portraying the underside of success.

  • Words: Emmaline Zanelli

I have a core memory of a failure where my nonno bought my brothers and me a few awesome fresh croissants, and then my little brother put them in the oven in the morning and then forgot about them until 8pm. When we took them out of the oven, they were pure charcoal, so I did drawings with them. We laughed so hard, but of course it was bittersweet – because no croissants.

The main image for the CityMag cover is the pizza on the sky background. I wanted it to feel like a dramatic eclipse, because of how it feels when you hit a failure moment – suddenly you’re swamped with doubt and this new failure seems to eclipse any previous successes. Kind of like how people say, ‘You’re only as good as your last show’. And I guess the thing with an eclipse is that it feels apocalyptic in the moment, but it’s ultimately fleeting.

The other images show drawings by Kurt that he feels represent success – flowers and a trophy (see one of them here). They’re riffing off the croissant story, and the drawings are done with a mixture of oil pastel and charcoal pizza crust – turning failure into success.

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