I love playful and affordable ($30!) artwork, and I’m pretty sure I found the next big thing in ThingCreatures, which portray enigmatic shadows of unknown creatures against their natural habitat’s brilliant background. With Arthur and Walter already spotted in the wild and available for purchase in multiple settings and colors, ThingCreatures are sure to sell like popcorn at a movie theater in no time.
Still not convinced you should get one? I sat down with the artist to hear his creative (accidental?) process explaining how ThingCreatures was born.
It’s actually completely random. I recently began painting as an outlet after work, and it’s been quite therapeutic. One of my paintings was a play with bold colors mixed with amorphous forms. I showed a friend who saw figures in the black forms, which I hadn’t seen before then. But there was “Arthur” – the first of the Things.
So the next time I painted, I set out to give the form some life and I came up with the Arthur character, defined by his skulking, mouth-agape, head and small, beady white eye. I really liked him, and so I gave him a back story – the gullible hovering post-apocolyptic creature.
Then I thought I should give him friends. And so I created the website, and fleshed out some structure in how I would introduce the world I was creating. New creatures will be discovered as I discover them, and I’ll depict them – depending on their rarity – in any number of scenes. On my own walls I like to hang art that covers multiple canvases, and so displaying the Things becomes an artform in itself.
Jen Bokoff 