Nov 302011
 

It’s been some time since I have posted but I’ve been super busy.  There is a pretty good back catalogue of work I’ve done for various games and companies that I can begin to show on my blog, so posts should accelerate shortly.  But for now I’m hard at work preparing for my Joint Art Exhibition that I am hosting with my friend Charlie Garlette on December 10th.  Without further delay, here are all the details:

Swell Poster

Brave New World: Dystopian Art

Brave New World: Dystopian Art is an art event featuring works by local artists Christopher Reach and Charlie Garlette. It will take place on Saturday December 10th beginning at 12 PM upstairs in Studio 12 above Tapastry Restaurant in Montclair, NJ. The restaurant and adjoining gallery are located at 12 Church Street.

The exhibition will showcase works executed in a variety of techniques including life sized fabricated sculptures, large scale oil paintings, metalwork, digital media, and ceramic sculpture. Themes, rendered through each artists’ unique world view, range from trans-humanism to spiritualism, science fact to science fiction.

With social disarray, economic turmoil, and endless war enveloping our present and threatening our future, what will be left for the masses when the long night ends and dawn breaks on a Brave New World?

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Christopher Reach is a commercial artist who works internationally in the games and advertising industries. While his professional work is created digitally, Christopher’s training and regular adventures with acrylic and oil paint inform his style and allow the work to retain the feel of more traditional media.

His personal work focuses on many themes including anti-nuclear, anti-state, pro-peace, and pro-justice. Stylistically he draws inspiration from the great Dutch and Spanish painters of the 17th and 18th centuries, Constructivist Design principles, and Golden Age American illustrators like NC Wyeth and Howard Pyle. Christopher holds a BFA in Illustration and Animation from Montclair State University.

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Charlie Garlette has been interested in sculpture and the arts since his adolescence. His work has been described as Neo-Dadaist, DieselPunk and Sci-Fi Horrart. Having experimented in clay sculpture and wood fabrication through high school he continued his 3D curiosity post graduation during his years as an Assistant Pressman in a 60′s modern printshop in downtown Newark NJ. Having been surrounded by old strewn bits of machines long since out of commission, Charlie spawned primative forms from the gears, suction cups, and rags of the printshop.

His art has since taken many forms, from mixed media sculptures of varying size and degree to collage, ceramic, and metalwork forms. “To use any and all materials. To rebirth recycled, abandoned technology, and wasted resources of our world to create something that speaks back to its owners”. He doesn’t care how you reuse it, just do.

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So there you have it.  Please come out and support the arts.  We’ll have prints, actual paintings, sculptures, and cards for sale.  If you’d just like to come and look around and talk shop, that would be most appreciated as well.  It should be a really fun time and I look forward to seeing some of you there!

Dec 082010
 

RoboSanta

Here’s a sneak peak at my Christmas card/ImagineFX contest piece/possibly ArtOrder contest piece if Jon Schindehette allows the double entry (I seem to remember that being against the rules of the blog, but I’ll ask).  Always nice to be able to use one piece for multiple purposes.

The theme for the ImagineFX contest was robot santa. I took it a bit further with a sort of 1920s art deco rocketeer-esque santa figure.  The color scheme will be, what else, red and white.  I’m playing with a cut-out color separation look but I might switch back to my normal painting style.  I’ll have the final up tomorrow, or at the beginning of next week.  There’s nothing like trying to figure out how to put a beard on a robot.

Faunus

 Fantasy, New Art  Comments Off
Dec 022010
 

“Hello old friend, what news from beyond the woods?”

‘caw!’

“How fascinating…”

I was hoping to have another alien piece I was working on done today, in time for NASAs Astrobiology announcement but instead here is something completely different.  Its based on any number of the ram or stag-horned wood gods prevalent throughout various mythologies (Celtic, Norse, German, French, North American…).

The name Faunus refers to the Roman god, or one of the many fauni that were thought to exist as place spirits.  They were thought to commune with and protect the fauna and flora in their domain.  That said, they could also present a mortal danger to any human stupid or loud enough to disrupt and disturb them or their charges.

Cat and Mouse

 New Art  Comments Off
Dec 012010
 

Cat And Mouse

Finished a new black and white piece today so I skipped my sketch.  And also apparently forgot to upload the picture. Well here you go, some new art on this late night edition of my blog.  Goodnight all.

Nov 292010
 

Walrus

All the way from America’s Hat, home of the great Martin Brodeur, comes this walrus statue.  It was made in the 90s in Kugluktuk, Canada out of black soapstone. There is a companion walrus and they sit on an ice-float carved out of the same stuff.  The Artist is Kayak Miyok.  The original clearly didn’t have a cartoon top hat and stress lines.

I sketched this while watching what the host informed me was the “All new, and All American, Junkyard Wars”.  I guess what makes it “all new” and “all American” is that instead of a Brit the host is now an American with a southern accent.  Other than that it seemed to be the same as the British version. You aren’t fooling me today, Junkyard Wars.

Supafly

 New Art, Sketches  Comments Off
Nov 272010
 

Bad News Bird

Probably, in the future, I will not post sketches on the weekend. My day job and breaking from the reclusive life of an artist take up a good chunk of time.  But being that I only just started I figured I could soldier through this weekend.

I’ve heard it said that a bit of paranoia can be a healthy thing. I don’t know if that is true, but sometimes it is unavoidable.

Leftovers

 Fantasy, Horror, New Art, Sketches  Comments Off
Nov 262010
 

Leftovers

I have a lot of weird stuff around my studio. A lot.  Some of it serves to inspire, some of it serves as reference.  This shrunken head (no its not real, its made out of goat skin) has been itching to grace the shoulders of a troll or some such monster in a painting ever since I acquired it, but as of yet this has not come to pass.

Nov 252010
 

A Respectable Bird

Hope everyone enjoys their Thanks G.  I’ll be in Pennsylvania for the rest of the day, but beginning tomorrow things will get a bit more active around here.  I’ve started doing daily pencil sketches so I might as well post them here, despite my sketch phobia.  Most are from life. Some, like this one, are not. Live turkeys are hard to come by this time of year.

Saw a bunch of good people last night from back in the day.  Its always great to meet up with old friends. Now its family time, which also means its time to put some Wolfgang Gartner on the ipod and drive west for 2 hours.  Back tomorrow.

Oct 312010
 

With less than 15 minutes left of this glorious holiday and indeed of October itself I wanted to swing by after a very busy weekend to say: Happy Halloween!

Now its off to slap some neosporin on that fresh zombie bite and then back to the drawing board tommorow.

Happy Halloween

Oct 182010
 
Juggernaut

Juggernaut

Today we can say with a reasonable amount of certainty that there are no moon monsters and that a xenophobic race of diminutive green men are not planning humanity’s downfall from a base on Mars.  Indeed, we have outgrown the days when man can travel the stars in an aerodynamically preposterous cardboard boat with wings and pontoons glued on at random intervals (see: Himmelskibet).

And while it is possibly for the best that we have moved on from that last example it is, in my opinion, better to kick it old school from time to time and recapture the wonder of a retro-future than to get bogged down trying to make the ‘dark version of a painting of a graphic novel of a movie thats gritty and dark’.

Just saying, have some fun with it.