Are comic books art? Do the aesthetic qualities of the artwork in a comic book outweigh the fact that it was drawn for commercial purposes, or vice versa? Can anything, no matter how beautiful it is, be considered art if it wasn’t created as art for art’s sake?

These are all good questions about the validity of comic books as art. Thankfully, we WON’T be answering them here — we’ll leave the debate to the experts. Because while the value of the art from comic book is often contested, artwork INSPIRED BY comic books and cartoons is art. And there’s no debating that.

Sketch My Portrait for a Nickel

(images via: ARTST.com)

You have to be a glutton for punishment if you get your caricature drawn at a carnival. Paying your hard earned money so someone can draw a grotesque version of you has tinges of masochism, doesn’t it? And
that’s because when you get your caricature drawn, you’re asking someone to point out all your flaws and your strange features and EXAGGERATE them.

While cartoon-inspired fine art is ages away from carny caricature, the common thread in both are these exaggerations. And nowhere are these exaggerations more pronounced than in cartoon-inspired portraits.

Pen… Paper… Action!

(images via: ARTST.com)

While many artists and critics look down on comic books, no one can deny that comics and cartoons have something incredibly special when it comes to action scenes. Years and years of super-heros have caused comic book artists to finely tune action sequences in a way fine art painters haven’t. When action is your bread and butter, it better be a baguette and Beurre De Baratte. Artwork inspired by comics and cartoons is no different — the brilliant way comic books depict action is part of the language with which these artists are using to speak.

Abstract ‘Toons

While you can’t really consider work with cartoons truly abstract, several artists who are inspired by the comics and cartoon mediums will use cartoon imagery to approach abstractions. And it’s in these works where artists INSPIRED BY comics and cartoons really start to shine, because it’s these works which most distinctly stand apart from the often mocked and looked down-upon comic book and cartoon source
material.

“All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures.
It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.”
–Walt Disney

Its a rare artist that hasn’t at one time or another attempted a self-portrait. Sometimes its for the most obvious reason, that in painting himself he has a ready, willing and free model. At other times artists may use self-portraits to advertise their skills, practice their craft, explore some inner turmoil or stake a place in history. Whatever reason the artist might think he had for the painting though, with art as with writing, the act of creation always reveals something about the creator. Whether its the unusual yellow ambience of a Van Gogh or the isolation of Hitlers self-portrait its always possible to learn a little more about the artist by reading between the brush-strokes.

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528 )

(image source: wikimedia)

The German painter Albrecht Durer was perhaps the first really prolific self-portraitist, producing at least twelve images of himself, including three oil portraits, and figures in four altar pieces. He was something of a child prodigy, painting from an early age, and by his twenties was selling his works all over Europe. He was highly conscious of his public image and reputation and I believe we can see that in this self-portrait which depicts him in an idealized way, elaborately groomed and dressed in the very latest Italian fashion to demonstrate to the world his international success. Although he was only a young man at the time, he was clearly confident of his talent and aiming to go far.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669 )

(image via: wikipedia)

The Dutch artist Rembrandt was also a prolific painter of self-portraits. At one time about ninety paintings were counted as Rembrandt self-portraits, but it is now known that he had his students copy his own self-portraits as part of their training. Art experts currently believe that he was responsible for over forty paintings, as well as a few drawings and thirty-one etchings, which is still pretty impressive. An interesting aspect of Rembrandt’s self-portraits, other than their undoubted quality, is what we can discover in their sheer number and time-span. They record his progress from an uncertain young man, through his time as a very successful portrait-painter in the 1630s, to the later troubled but powerful self-portraits of his old age.

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746 – 1828)

(image via: wikimedia)

The Spanish painter Goya occupies a unique place in art history, regarded by many as the last of the old masters and first of the moderns. He was a court painter to the Spanish Crown and a chronicler of history, who was bold in handling color and regarded as daring for the subversive elements in his art. In later years he suffered physical and mental breakdown, complaining of deafness, poor vision and loss of balance. Postmortem diagnosis pointed toward possible paranoid dementia due to unknown brain trauma. This self-portrait of him with Dr Arrieta reflects his troubled state of mind, with its themes of illness and mortality.

Vincent Willem van Gogh (1853 – 1890)

(image via: wikimedia

Think about a ‘tormented artist’ and one of the first names that come to mind is likely to be Van Gogh. This Dutch post-impressionist is probably as well known for the ‘cutting-his-own-ear-off’ incident (which may or may not have happened as reported) as he is for his considerable body of work. One of the characteristics of his paintings is the sunny yellow ambiance that infuses them. Van Gogh indulged heavy in absinthe, a drink known to produce ‘yellow vision’ in addicts. The drug digitalis, which he is also believed to have taken, would also produce ‘yellow vision’. Interestingly and strangely enough, Van Gogh never seems to look directly at his ‘audience’ in his self-portraits.

Claude Oscar Monet (1840 – 1926)

(image via: monetalia

Monet was a founder of the French impressionist style of painting, which is based on the artist conveying his perceptions of the subject rather than a precise likeness. The term ‘impressionism’ is in fact derived from the title of Monet’s painting ‘Impression, Sunrise’. As his career developed Monet was plagued by cataracts in his eyes. These reduce vision and can make things appear blurry and ‘out-of-focus’. It is hard to know how much his signature style of softly blurred images owes to artistic vision and how much to his cataract problems. In later life was he interpreting the world in an impressionistic way or simply reflecting the distorted version of it that he actually saw ?

Toulouse Lautrec (1864 – 1901)

(image via: toulouse-lautrec-foundation)

Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa or simply Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French artist famous for his depictions of the theatrical and decadent life of fin de siecle Paris. Looking at this self-portrait you see in the mirror the reflection of a young man, handsome and apparently normal in all ways that are visible. The reality was somewhat different. As a child he fractured both thigh bones and the breaks did not heal properly. His legs ceased to grow, so that as an adult he was only 5 ft tall, with an adult-sized torso but child-sized legs which were only 27.5 in long. Ironically, in view of his famous preoccupation with the sexuality of the Folies Bergere, he apparently had hyper-trophied genitals too.

Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954) – painting the pain

(image via: wikipedia)

When looking at this self-portrait, the pain is evident in her face. Pain and determination are both things that characterized this artist’s difficult life. Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón spent many years bedridden following a terrible accident, with only herself for a model. Despite her handicaps she painted prolifically using vibrant colors in a unique style influenced by the indigenous cultures of Mexico and European influences including Realism, Symbolism and Surrealism. Many of her works are self-portraits that symbolically express her own pain and sexuality. The 50 or so of them include many of herself from the waist up, and also some nightmarish representations which symbolize her physical sufferings. She insisted, “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”

Andrew Warhol ( 1928 – 1987)

(image via: artquotes)

Andy Warhol, darling of the 1960s New York art scene and prince of ‘pop art’, was a self-styled enigma who hid himself away in the full glare of the worlds media . Though he courted publicity skilfully and at times obsessionally, he was an intensely private person. In manipulating the media he was a master of misdirection and ‘playing dumb’, always claiming that all all anyone needed to know about him and his works was already there, “on the surface”. Its not surprising then that what I see in this self-portrait is an artist who, even while saying to the world ‘hey this is me’, still attempts to camouflage and obscure the reality.

Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945)

(image via: dailymail)

And here, as they say, is a man who needs no introduction. I think we’re all pretty familiar with his main claims to fame (or infamy) but one of his lesser known aspirations was to be an artist. This watercolor is thought to be the earliest self-portrait by Adolf Hitler, painted in 1910 when the future Fuhrer was 21 and struggling to make his mark on the art world. The figure is strangely anonymous, with no nose or mouth yet Hitler was keen to identify himself by daubing a cross and the initials AH above it. The loneliness of someone who cannot connect with the world around him or the people in it rests on the surface of the self-portrait. Perhaps this was just a romantic vision Hitler had of himself, or perhaps it was a genuine expression of a deeper alienation.

(work via ARTST.com)

It takes a special kind of person to actively pursue a messy career, be they a port-o-potty cleaner or a technician on an oil rig. Messy artists, you know, ones who cherish a sloppy line here and a paint splotch there, their canvases falling apart at the weight of their paint, belong in those ranks. And while the simple beauty of a clean line is certainly something to be cherished, so are the messy splotches of these dirty artists.

Angels With Dirty Faces

(images via Mike Booker)

(image via Mark Welsh)

(image via Paul Leli)

“The eyes are the window to the soul,” goes the famous Proverb. So when a messy artist takes to messing up those eyes, and the rest of a person’s face, what we find staring back at us is scary. Grotesque faces can really be terrifying. They can evoke pity, anger, sadness and confusion. Whatever feeling provoked in the viewer, however, one thing can be sure — as long as the viewer is feeling SOMETHING, the artist succeeds. And be sure that a messily painted face is near impossible to leave a viewer cold and unemotional.

Smudgy Stars

(image via Paul Leli)

(images via Paul Leli and Lichiban)

(images via Paul Leli)

And when that messy face is someone familiar, like a celebrity? Those emotions get all mixed up with conflicting feelings of familiarity and adoration and disgust and interest and whatever else that particular celebrity makes you feel. Depicting famous people in a demented manner is a great way for artists to grab hold of the neck of our pop ‘n celebrity-obsessed culture and shake it and squeeze it while yelling “Hey! Look at me! I can paint pretty well!”

Abstract Mess

(images via Listen04)

And when you remove the faces and the celebrity and you’re left with gooey primitive sludge… what feelings are evoked then? Without the complicated emotions that are borne out of a demented, terrifying face, you’re left with the same feeling both children and cave painters share — JOY.

“Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.” –  Chuck Palahniuk

Julien Babigeon is a French graphic designer going by the name Skooly DK. What does Skooly DK mean? How did Julien get that name? “Don’t ask me why. It’s a little bit complicated.” The most-likely tangled and twisty origin story of Julien’s “Skooly DK” moniker is an apt metaphor for his art–vintage, strange, hard to describe and, at the end of the day, simply awesome.

Music Makes Him Lose Control

(images via: ARTST)

If we start to unpack the box marked “Who Is Skooly DK,” sitting at the very top will be a stack of LPs. Some of his most inspired designs and some of his more innovative techniques have been applied to album covers, gig posters and other music-related materials.

There’s a reason for that–in the artist’s own words: “I can admit that i really love to work on record covers… i’m a big music lover.” Skooly’s diverse work can be seen on covers for Ninja Tune, Dutch Rhythm Combo and Birdy Nam Nam, among other acts and artists.

Old Skool

(images via: ARTST)

When asked to describe his artwork, Skooly DK is at a loss for words; there are too many inspirations, too many thoughts and ideas and THINGS just going on in each picture for him to point his finger at one or two influences or overarching concepts.

But when pressed further, Skooly comes up with an answer that begins to cut to the bone of his work: “I’m really inspired by vintage advertisings, american types, pop art, op-art, psychedelic shapes and punk stuff.”

From fold lines and stains to color schemes straight out of the late 70s, Skooly’s work, while fresh and new and as crisp as any late ‘aughts design work out there, is firmly rooted in the idea of vintage.

There’s an instant likability factor to Skooly’s work that comes out of that vintage old school-ness; nostalgia as a foot in the door. And that’s the key to an upper hand in the art world in the viral video era–have a hook and make ’em think they know your stuff, and you’re golden.

Alliteration Is Always Amazing

(images via: ARTST)

It’s true.

But beyond that, Skooly’s on to something here–alliteration plus snacks plus cartoons plus a coat of vintage paint equals brilliant design. This bite size (pun intended) punny word game art is simple and great; it’s the kind of poster begging to be shared on Twitter or Facebook, the kind of poster you want to send to three friends.

Space Face

(images via: ARTST)

If there’s a bridge over the gap between the art and music of the 70s and 80s and the art and music of today, it’s probably in outer space. After all, Mars is apparently the home to both David Bowie and Lil Wayne.

Skooly DK’s space-inspired artwork follows the same path–vector graphics techniques and computerized colors collide with old school cut-out techniques and moldy old photographs, making something entirely new.

Perhaps these pieces are Skooly’s way of staring into his future… and his past–forward and backward, all at the same time.

“Whoa.”-Keanu Reeves

To see more of Skooly DK’s work, head over to his profile on ARTST.

Adan Banuelos is a Tucson-based artist and designer working in multiple mediums, from drawing to sculpting to screen-printing and everything in between.

Childhood In The Gallery

(images via: ARTST)

Banuelos’ art is a realm where squirt guns, candy and sneakers can mingle with brass knuckles, switch blades and low-riders. Says Banuelos, “My artwork is mainly inspired from childhood memories. I like to analyze emotions and desires as they evolve from childhood, through adolescence, and into adulthood.”

His Father’s Son

(images via: ARTST)

When asked who he most looks up to in the art world, Banuelos proudly says his father. His dad, an immigrant from Mexico, might’ve had a huge impact on Banuelos’ style but he never became a full time artist; he’s a janitor. Says Banuelos: “My dad was, and still is, a very talented, self-taught muralist and sign maker. He always had side jobs and spent most his free time in the garage and job sites. I loved watching him paint. I learned a lot about lettering and composition.”

Great Art By Design

(images via: ARTST)

It’s no accident that the design acumen of Banuelos’ paintings, sculptures and T-shirts is a cut above the rest; after years of art school under his belt, Banuelos now works for CreativeMachines.comdesigning and fabricating museum exhibits. He welds, does wood working and crafts machine parts for
exhibits that have been seen in museums all over the world, from Norway to Egypt to New York and even his native Tucson.

You can see more of Adan Banuelos’ work at his profile on ARTST and on his website, AdanBanuelos.wordpress.com.