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Iconic artwork for their albums is part of the Rolling Stones’ great work. Just think of Andy Warhol’s legendary “Sticky Fingers” zipper. The cover for the band’s 25th studio album was also designed by an artist: painter Nathaniel Mary Quinn.
The American artist is known for his hybrid, fragmented portraits. These are not collages because the pictures are all painted. Quinn combines classic oil painting with pastel, charcoal and gouache to create faces that look like torn puzzles.
The result is such a work, which also goes by the name “Stones Trinity” and the title itself refers to the fusion of the musicians into a single personality, which consists of three parts (of course a bit of religious exaggeration through the allusion to the Holy Trinity should not be missing). Sure, there’s no room between the remaining musicians, the Stones are still a quasi-religious unit in 2026.
“The Miracle” as a role model for the Rolling Stones?
Quinn is proud of his work, calling it a “dialogue with one of the most enduring forces in cultural history.” However, the artist and the Stones are by no means breaking new ground when it comes to music history. There have also been cover artworks in the past that showed a fusion of the members of a band. Did the Stones take Queen as their model?
One of the most famous is probably the cover of “The Miracle” (1989) by Queen. The faces of all four band members were merged into a single “uber-face” using a then-groundbreaking (and quite expensive!) digital image editor. In retrospect, the artwork was hugely romanticized, especially by fans, as a kind of artistic-mythical unity against fate. At that time, the public did not yet know about Freddie Mercury’s HIV infection and later AIDS disease.
But there was also a mission behind the cover: for the first time, all songs by the individual Queen members of the entire band were attributed to “Queen”. The fused face was probably also the graphic implementation of this renunciation of ego.
Trick technique with a message
Blending faces into one another was nothing new, even at the time of “The Miracle”. On the cover of the single “Voulez Vous,” the members of ABBA stand so close together that their profiles and hair appear drawn together almost like a single sculptural form. The legendary, digitally created cover artwork of “Remain In Light” by the Talking Heads with its red masks on the band members’ faces is certainly a model. However, David Byrne and colleagues were more concerned with alienation than with fusion.
You don’t need any particularly complex tricks for such morphing processes, as the artwork for the live single of “Invisible Touch” by Genesis shows. The bodies of Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks were arranged so that they visually flowed into each other.
Of course, the morphing effect later spread to music videos. No wonder, as the process seems even more surprising and whimsical here. Like in the clip for Michael Jackson’s “Black Or White, where faces of different ethnicities and genders merge into one another. This is less about an artistic unity, as the Rolling Stones want to express. Instead, a unity and equality of people triumphs in a visualized form, technically and humanistically.
