Whenever David Bowie plays Philadelphia, he visits the city's art museum. His destination? Gallery 182, devoted to Marcel Duchamp. Seattle painter Michael Lane can appreciate such artist-on-artist fixations. Growing up in the City of Brotherly Love, he listened to music obsessively while he drew. He still spends hours in record stores, poring over album covers.

Recycling ideas is an essential skill for musical icons. Just ask Madonna. (Or Bryan Ferry, who abbreviated Duchamp's title The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even for a 1978 solo album filled with covers.) And so it is for Lane, who produces vivid screen prints of rock stars: Bowie, Morrissey, Patti, Siouxsie. Lane salvages items discarded by theaters—canvas opera backdrops, pieces of neoprene, even old paint—and uses them as his medium. "After a while, they knew not to throw anything away," says Lane of his former employers at a Philly set-design shop. Today, Seattle Opera and Issaquah's Village Theatre donate leftovers.

Even his images are recycled; he sticks to iconic ones like Lou Reed on the jacket of Transformer. From there, he riffs on the source material. Colors, textures, and overlays are cued by his love for the musicians. Grace Jones is "disco, Pop Rocks, and Mountain Dew," Lane says, rendered in shimmering gold, orange, and pink; Iggy Pop stares out in steel and flat black, his face all angles. A sly nod to Andy Warhol punctuates his midnight-blue-and-moonlight portraits of seedy-underbelly obsessive Reed. Two tiny red puncture wounds dot the rocker's neck; Reed's nickname for the pop artist and sometimes Velvet Underground manager was "Drella," a contraction of Cinderella and Dracula.

Lane deliberately keeps these works modest sized and affordable, producing them in unlimited editions. A five-by-five-inch Iggy, Lou, or Bowie costs $12, less than most new albums. "I'd like them all to go home with people, just like a CD or tape would."