This piece is from my series of work “I’m Here You’re Not There”. You can see more of my work on my portfolio: cargocollective.com/robinwang

Peter really enjoys shifting between related disciplines, including typography, sculpture, photography, drawing, painting and collage, to create a unique piece of work for each assignment and also for himself. In the recent time, illustration has become more and more important in his daily work. A driving force in this process is carrying several sketchbooks whereever he goes and filling them up like mad. He received his formal education from the University of Applied Sciences, Trier, Germany and, as a Fulbright scholar, an M.A. from the Savannah College of Art & design, USA.

Gephart draws inspiration from fantastic realism, satiric imagery, culture jamming, asian ink-painting, Pop Art and Graffiti. His text-inspired works focus on the hidden motifs of his characters, but also sample the pleasure of tragic humor as a consequence of human adaption and mainstream.
Felix Gephart received a Fulbright grant and graduated with an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York.

His work has been internationally featured amongst others by Novum, DIE ZEIT, Illusive, Graphische Kunst, Empty magazine, Dpi magazine, Playboy magazine and Esquire magazine. In October 2009, 80 drawings were shown on the occasion of his solo show at the A. Paul Weber Museum, Ratzeburg.

I’m a freelance illustrator and a graphic designer, law graduated by chance. I live in Padova, Italy, and I have spent most part of my life drawing and loving arts. My illustrations always start from a picture and a certain mood. I am not quite sure what I’m doing when I start to draw until the artwork is finally completed – for me this is the only way to be direct.

Artist statement:
I have always had an eye for the strange beauty in the grotesqueries of life; This appreciation is now very evident in work that I am making. Inspired by the relationship between dreams, natural world and the emptiness of consumer culture, between safe childhood playing to everyday marks of reality I bring and create a new type of creatures in my imaginary world. It is a whole range of characters from the ones in darker corners of the streets of soulless cities to the safe and pure creatures from imagination in my wonderland trying through them to prove that I have never grown up, or at least have never lost touch with my innocent childhood self.

My body of work is built of this melancholy interaction between man-made status symbols and frozen moments of the utopian childhood memories. In my work I often flirt with different typefaces, superimposing pieces of print on top of my illustrations, or using them as part of the drawings. I often use draws in black ink on top of these collages, using all kind of hand written scribbles often, which pull the focus of the work back from the adult world to the realms of childhood. This experimenting with more text and new techniques led me to emerging of very personal style.

The characters i paint may seem like some creatures from another dimension, real but unreal, sometimes very closely connected with childhood, playful and inventive, sometimes abandoned and tragically sad and full of misery. But i think they are simply us, modern society without it’s masks, without the fake presentations that make us acceptable to whatever group we are a part of. Yet the only place where we are truly revealed the way we really are is one from the inside. We all share feelings of fear and loneliness. We all sometimes feel ugly and insecure.

If you examine my work closely, you might come to the realization that my creatures are really kind of self portraits, set in a fantastical landscapes of imaginary world which echoes of her own… a bitter, yet sweetly coated prescription for modern life.

Bak issue 15 cover

Take a special look to the article about Francoise Nielly, a french artist with wonderful paintings.

Bak 15 article - Francoise Nielly

Some words about Bak:

Bak Magazine is one of the greatest online visual arts magazines on the internet. It was January 2006 when Bak was founded by a Turkish graphic designer, Ozan Karakoc, in Istanbul. In a very short time after its release, Bak became very popular among the art lovers from all over the world.

As a bilingual magazine (English and Turkish), Bak is downloaded and read by hundreds of thousands of people from more than 140 countries. In October 2008, Bak moved to Los Angeles, California.

In Bak, there are tons of graphic design works, illustrations, paintings and photographs, submitted by its talented readers. One of the most important elements of Bak’s content is the special artist interviews. In 15 issues, Bak hosted 140 artists including world famous illustrators Gottfried Helnwein, Brad Holland, Jack Unruh, Kent Williams, Oleg Stavrowsky, giants of photography Jill Greenberg, Eugenio Recuenco, Phillip Toledano, Quentin Shih, Seb Janiak and popular graphic designers Vince Frost, Andrio Abero, Gerard Huerta, Si Scott and Tom Muller.

All issues of Bak Magazine can be downloaded on www.bakmagazine.com for free.

Its aim, born from a precise editorial choice, is collecting and exhibiting the work of visual artists in a pure form. Presenting it simply as data itself: no artist bio, no critical analysis of the works, no extra info that could in any way distract from the innediate impact the work has on the watcher.

DAYDREAMING MAGAZINE November 2009 ONLINE

“RAPTUROUS NATURE”
The quarrel between man, nature and art, Unavoidable down the centuries, is a matter worthy an endless soap-opera. For or against, willing or not, the artist has always brood in his own shadow over the lunatic terror for the fact that his creation wouldn’t have bear the comparison with Mother Earth. Many took their distance, other ridiscover her right now, some did never abandon her. The confrontation’s just begun…

Inside:

Nanni Spano (Metamorphosis):
High definition and macro modality investigating on details and texture of algas, of cortex, on stones and leaves, have unattendedly penetrated from other image-worlds with a violent meanwhile classical synthesis. While we’re expecting the image to be clear and still like crystal, meeting our visual pleasure, the artist contaminates and melts its elements and sense, slipping in the disquiet for an impossible unalterability- (G. Carbi)

Dan May (Illustrations):
A fairy Arcadia is being illustrated, populated with Beauty-nymphs and Beast-satyrs, fainting infancy and insects. Melancholic poetry enlighted masterfully from the inside.

Heiko Muller (Drawing/Mixed Media/Oil):
Through an unconventional use of stylistic sovrapposition, the artist lets us attend a very interesting mediation between the expressive medium and the natural datum, between illustration and photography, between Pop echoes and Action paintings, breathing life into a powerful and immediate iconography confronting nature and history.

Scott G.Brooks (Painting):
Here’s the umpteenth violence to the american dream, far from being gratuitous, together with the umpteenth homage to renaissance art, far from being imitation. Deformities legitimates themselves with confident looks of disquieting wellbeing; distortion meets smiling our eye. What if the world was this?

De Becker ( Into the wild):
The transposition of the urban subject in the natural datum, fundamental intuition, provokes a grotesque disorientation, but not only… the gamut of sensations provided by these images indicates a relational investigation between man and nature that is far from being unveiled.