Welcome to the mysterious world of Placide Avantia—an illustrator, tattoo artist, and self-professed alien. Working from Fuscare—her dimly lit studio located in the south of France—Placide Avantia uses black vegan ink and her dark imagination to spawn creatures that otherwise dwell only in nightmares, alternate worlds, and untold myths. From razor-beaked crows to the jagged […]
Category: Animals
Hand-Stitched Embroideries Floating on “Disappearing” Fabric
Embroidery is very tactile medium. There’s little, if any, visual tricky that can come from the fuzziness of thread on fabric. Artist Katerina Marchenko pushes this idea to its limit, however, with her stitching on tulle. Stretched tightly across the embroidery hoop, the fabric seems to disappear as the layered thread and beading is all […]
Mysteries and Dark Tales: Tattoos by Meagan Blackwood
Meagan Blackwood is a Montreal-based tattoo artist who uses black vegan ink to produce mystical, thought-provoking images. Visiting her Instagram portfolio is like opening an illustrated book of Grimm’s fairytales; animals, people, and disembodied parts dance across skin or pose in an esoteric fashion, everything tinged with an aspect of playfulness and/or darkness. With her […]
Modern Alchemy: Symbolic Paintings by El Gato Chimney
El Gato Chimney is a self-taught artist based in Milan. His colorful paintings are a form of modern alchemy, combining the aesthetics of medieval art (the 9th and 10th centuries) with steampunk culture, pagan symbolism, street art, and surrealism. In each piece, anthropomorphic animals and uncanny hybrids populate Bosch-like fields, gathering to perform arcane rites […]
Striking Animal Tattoos That Reveal the Predator Within
As humans, we like to define ourselves by what’s around us. Our belongings, our friends, and our affiliations help us relate to contemporary culture. They also reveal the essence of who we are—or at least who we think we are. The “spirit animal” is one mechanism in which we label ourselves. Whether we’re a tiger, bear, or giant […]
Sorrow, Healing, and Peace: Visuals by Martin Stranka
Martin Stranka is a photographer whose atmospheric images walk the line between dreams and awakening. His journey as a photographer began 10 years ago, following the tragic loss of someone close to him. “I felt like I had to express my self somehow,” he explains. “I felt like I needed to find something like a […]
Stories of Death and Creation in Illustrations by Lauren Marx
Lauren Marx is an artist based in St. Louis, Missouri, who tells stories about birth, death, nature, and the suffering caused by mental illness. Her subjects are animals (her longstanding passion), which she draws with a morbid and mythical flair; peruse her gallery and you will see three-headed calves, geese entwined by their entrails, and […]
Armin Blasbichler’s Taxidermy Designs Critique Consumption
Armin Blasbichler is an artist, architect, and educator whose studio explores designs built on “transgression and chance, conceptually and physically.” When he’s not making cross-shaped coffins and glowing nooses that spray water (both of which contain clever literary allusions), he can be found making works that critique unpleasant cultural trends, such as over-consumption in the […]
Nature Illustrations that Venture “Into the Woods” and Beyond
In Stephen Sondheim’s critically-acclaimed musical Into the Woods, characters from several iconic fairy tales are intertwined as they each venture into the one place they’re all unsure of—the dark woods. This is the place where Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack (from “Jack and the Beanstalk”) and others have to leave their comfort zones and […]
The Essence of Skin: An Interview with Evelyn Bencicova
If you enjoy dark art, chances are that you’ve encountered the incredible work of Slovakian photographer Evelyn Bencicova. I’ve written about her work twice before, describing each photo as an “otherworldly vision” of beauty that “extends into the alien and absurd.” Born in 1992, Bencicova bought her first camera after she had eye surgery at […]