I had the good fortune to meet artist Alan Brown (aka Medusawolf) during
my second year of art school, and he's been a good buddy of mine and a
serious source of inspiration ever since. Alan imbues his skillfully
rendered illustrations of other worlds and other-worldy characters with a
sense of magic, mystery and discovery that makes each new work he
shares an exciting new experience. You can see his work on his blog, or
his Etsy page, where you'll find paintings and prints, each accompanied by a clever caption suggestive of a larger narrative.
In
addition to the abundance of drawings, paintings, etchings, and prints
he turns out on a regular basis, I am never surprised to hear
on any given day that he's busy carving action figures from wood,
building a work table from scratch, making his own t-shirts, or
fashioning masks and costumes resembling the creatures in
his illustrations. Alan has a killer sense of humor, a cinematic
imagination, and a seemingly endless desire to learn, try, and create
new things. For all these reasons
and more, Alan is one of my most favorite artists and grown up kids.
He's currently
finishing up a comic titled Ovoyyamar*, and I'm psyched to post a few
excerpts from that here, along with his answers to a handful of questions that might be
of interest to creative kids and grown up kids alike. Click the "read more" link below to see the full post. (*Parents: please note, some of the topics in this post and illustrations on the Ovoyyamar blog page may be slightly spooky to younger kiddos).
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| An excerpt from Alan's comic Ovoyyamar |
M/B: I've
seen you note in several places that you "grew up near the woods and
discovered the world was a weird mystery." Can you speak a little more
to that, and/or any experiences you had as a kid that persist as
influential forces in your work today?
AB: The
small neighborhood I grew up in along the Chesapeake Bay is surrounded
on one side by shoreline and on the other side by forests and fields.
Standing by the water, exploring the rocky beach, looking out across 7
or 8 miles of water toward the opposite shore, which at times in the
winter would become completely iced over creating enormous drifts of
snow and tall spiky hills of ice, it was all pretty wondrous.
