Philip Smiley is another artist who finds the black line to be a very
natural way of expressing himself. For him it began with a friend asking
to attempt something in an etched style – eight years later and it’s very
much a style of his own. Like Ollie Johns, part of the charm is in the
detail, with the main forms constructed from smaller ones, all tangled
together in vines and roots.
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Alongside the appetite for craft-based work at the moment, there goes
a tendency to use illustrative flourishes as decoration – baroque-like
extravagance in times of hardship, perhaps. Intricate and intriguing they
might be, but creatives who tread moodier, more thoughtful roads rarely
see themselves as providers of aesthetic whimsy. Animator Joseph
Pierce uses his visceral animation technique to conjure up inner truths,
which are often quite monstrous.
“Animation and illustration to often
fall into a merely aesthetic context,
without much depth and substance,”
says Pierce. “I think it’s right to
explore darker sides of the human
psyche. There is an appetite for it
and, despite what Hollywood and
the mainstream would suggest, I
believe audiences do want to be
challenged, even if it makes for an
unsettling experience.”
When this is the goal, making images becomes more than creating
a look, or expressing a message. Themes like dystopia and mutation
ooze through the drawings of San Francisco-based illustrator Ben Jelter.
With illustration feeding a storytelling instinct, he created a graphic
novel called The Tumor. “Story-wise it is more like Franz Kafka because
although inexplicable surreal events occur, the narrative is not confusing
to the viewer. One of the greatest challenges for me was writing the
story. Since I am an artist professionally, I wanted to make sure that the
story was up to the same level as the art,” he says.
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Ben