The Monsters Never Really Went Away

The childhood world of monsters, vampires, fantasy beasts, zombies, comics, posters, fantasy art and book covers is still there somewhere. I do not always paint those things directly now, but they are part of the visual soup I grew up in. They shaped what I found exciting in an image before I had any grown-up language for influence, style or subject matter.

A lot of that early drawing was imitation in the best sense. I saw something I loved and wanted to make something like it. Movie posters, comic panels, pulp covers and fantasy images all had that sense of heightened reality. They were not polite. They had drama, colour, threat, beauty, melodrama, and sometimes complete nonsense. Excellent ingredients, frankly.

The difficulty is that I cannot build visual fantasy worlds from imagination in the way I once imagined an artist might. Aphantasia means I do not have a reliable inner picture to copy from. I can understand the idea of a dragon eating a zombie, but I cannot see it clearly enough in my head to move it from imagination to paper. There is no finished internal image waiting to be transferred.

That probably ended some childhood fantasies about becoming a comic artist in the conventional sense. Comics and fantasy illustration rely heavily on constructing scenes, bodies, costumes, expressions and worlds from imagination. I can conceptually understand all of that, but the visual part has to come from somewhere outside my head: a reference, a photograph, a model, a pose, an accident, something I can actually look at.

I did have a period making my own versions of pulp magazine covers, and I enjoyed parts of that. Some of it worked. But it was also harder and less relaxing, because I was forcing the practice into an area where my brain does not naturally help me. I do not make art to punish myself. I do it because I enjoy the process, so I try to build a process that gives me the best chance of enjoying it.

That means the fantasy influence is often there as energy rather than literal subject matter. It shows up in intensity, theatricality, heightened colour, dramatic faces, odd atmosphere, and the pleasure of an image that feels larger than ordinary life. Viewers may not look at a painting and think, ah yes, that is clearly from a childhood diet of comics and monsters. I can feel the trace, though.

So the monsters never really went away. They just changed jobs. They are not always on the canvas as monsters. Sometimes they are in the colour, the exaggeration, the mood, or the impulse to make an image that has more voltage than the everyday thing it started from.

This is part of a short series drawn from a longer interview about making art, process, aphantasia, mental health practice, and finding a more honest way to share the work.