Mapa de Calor
By Taylor Phinney & David Roselló aka Manifest Butter
DR: My name is David Roselló. I'm an artist, an industrial designer, and I'm addicted to two wheels. I try to spend as much time as I can outside. Exploring, riding my bike, just being outside.
TP: And I am Taylor Phinney. I am also an artist. Sometimes DJ. I used to race bicycles professionally, now I just ride them for fun and I love to spend as much time outside as possible whether it's building and maintaining trails or shredding trails or just exploring.
Manifest Butter is an art project that David and I started in 2017. The project was born on a bike ride to Olot. Kasia was also there and we team time trialled home and were racing each other but that was where the idea was born.
We basically started painting on this cycling jacket and put it on Instagram to see if people would be interested and we got a bunch of responses and then from there we just started doing one off kind of projects and sending jackets and bike bags all over the world.
Now we have a warehouse just outside of Girona where we paint and do other projects whether it's graphic design, designing different things for helmets or jerseys or just doing our own painting projects. It's pretty varied.
We want to keep the spirit of painting personal and leave it as a project for what it is but we're expanding at a rate that is about how fast we move in general. We like it slow.
DR: My connection with cycling and art is they both make me happy. Every time I paint or go for a bike ride, it's just pure happiness, it's the two things that I like to do most in my life.
TP: My relationship with cycling started from a young age with my parents being professional cyclists and biking was more of a profession for me at first and then once I stepped away it turned into more of a passion and more therapeutic which is what I wanted it to be. And painting was very much a therapy for me at the beginning and is now turning into a bit more of a profession but trying to keep that spirit of therapy always.
DR: The concept of the canvas is based on a heat map, where you can see the most common routes around Girona.
TP: The places that people go the most are going to have more heat. The places people go the least are going to have smaller traces. This is how we find new trails and explore new areas. We had a lot of different ideas for the piece, but eventually the map concept seemed like the most fitting for both The Service Course and for the community.
DR: I think there is no Manifest Butter style. Well, it depends on each piece. I mean, I would not define a style.
TP: What drew me to working with David in the first place was that he has an ability to be very detail oriented where I'm more rugged or destructive. Our style is generally chaotic, but also detailed. I think it fits within that style, this map.
We only had a week to do it and it was the biggest painting that we have ever done. We painted the whole base layer with our feet because we didn't want to bend down. It was nice to have a deadline and just make sure you smash something out before it's too late, and you’ve got to hang it up in front of the whole town.
There are a lot of inside jokes or personal things in the map, but probably our favourite is the quarter tap, which is the jump line that we have right behind the warehouse for mountain biking, our go to 20-minute lap.
There are many other hidden things, but if they're hidden and we speak about them, then they're not hidden anymore, are they?
We had to cut 12cm off of each side. We currently have 50 squares of 8cm. You can mix and match them, you can make your own kind of collection and canvas out of them. We will have some for sale at The Service Course.
We built the frames ourselves and stretched all of these little squares. So, everything is handmade using wood that we had been using as a painting rack that we've had in the warehouse for the past couple of years. So, a little piece of the studio.
“Mapa de Calor” takes pride of place at our new home: Carrer Nord, 20, 17001, Girona, Spain
