New York-based artist Yohei Horishita creates digital illustrations with a textured effect that evokes traditional painting. His work is ornate and figurative, juxtaposing human characters with imaginary settings that seem to belong to no particular time or place. Flowers and feathers consume his backgrounds, cultivating a fantasy space removed from our contemporary reality. While Horishita does extensive client work, his pieces have a distinct style that allows them to stand alone.
New York-based artist Yohei Horishita creates digital illustrations with a textured effect that evokes traditional painting. His work is ornate and figurative, juxtaposing human characters with imaginary settings that seem to belong to no particular time or place. Flowers and feathers consume his backgrounds, cultivating a fantasy space removed from our contemporary reality. While Horishita does extensive client work, his pieces have a distinct style that allows them to stand alone.
Canadian multimedia artist Jon Rafman often explores the boundaries between our real lives and our virtual lives. Working primarily in digital media, his works illustrate a modern sense of reality through humour and irony. He is perhaps best known for exhibiting found images from Google Street View, titled "9-Eyes". In his ongoing series "Brand New Paint Job", Rafman re-appropriates famous paintings by contemporary artists into the 3D digital realm.
Though the creatures of Claudio Romo are bizarre and at times, frightening, the illustrator’s distinct linework gives each a certain elegance. The Chile-based artist has produced a number of books carrying his strange monsters and plantlife (among them, the beautifully titled “The Book of Imprudent Flora”). Through often carrying no specific timeline, his practice has also extended into the futuristic, as evidenced below.
“Subway Doodle” is the name Ben Rubin uses when posting drawings he makes on his commute to and from work each day. The artist snaps a photo and using his iPad, he inserts monsters, animals, and occasionally horrifying scenes into everyday life. Sometimes, the fictional creatures soak in the banality of the subway with fellow passengers. Other times, unsuspecting passengers are unaware of the terror that sits next to them.
Minnesota based artist Alex Kuno best describes his work's narratives as apocalyptic, satiric fairytales. His mixed media illustrations are as dark as they are whimsical, following deranged subjects, often children, rendered in acrylics, graphite, chalk, ink, ballpoint pens and crayons on pine boards. His early series, after which he named his website, calls this world the "The Miscreants of Tiny Town", inhabited by lost orphans looking for a home in an endless, foreboding landscape that has as much personality as its characters. Though nightmarish, there's also a sense of romance in his young subjects' undying desire to eke out a better existence for themselves. A story about romance is at the heart of Kuno's latest series debuting on Valentine's Day at Dorothy Circus Gallery in Rome.
