Artist: Simon Whitmore
Medium: Computer imagery, pen drawings.
Background:

I have always liked graphic imagery, even before I could read my dad bought me comics (despite terse objections from my mum). It wasn’t until I was growing up and started to read 2000AD that I began to really appreciate the artistic quality within. Progressing through DC and Marvel, then to Japanese manga such as Akira and Pineapple Army and eventually to more adult based comics like Ghost in the shell, Mobius and Lone Wolf and Cub.

In my early teens I was fortunate to be a student of David Durston, his art class taught me all about the theory of Gestalt ie: the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts (basically a group is worth more than an individual). As I am into quite a lot of different things, this information was very relevant to me, even if I didn’t realise it for many years. He told me that it doesn’t matter what you do to produce a picture, it’s the finished piece that matters. He didn’t like me much though because I sold him some oil paints and ripped him off, then I sold him some cheap perfume to his wife and she came out in a horrible rash. I wasn’t a model student.

I was one of the kids that actually liked going on field trips to museums and art galleries, seeing all those different styles of paintings blew me away almost as much as the grafitti I saw from the train or bus getting to London. Video games also added to mix, I loved the old covers for games like Ghosts and Goblins, Strider and Bubble Bobble.

When I turned 18 I met Jamie Flaherty and Swam Millen two guys on the same rubbish Btec art class as me, we were all into the same kind of design and started to mess around on Photoshop and other software. They went on to university and I dropped out and got a job. Anyway, my style is basically playing with images in a photo collage way, often using humour and photograph I’ve taken myself.

Favourite artists:

John Berkey - US science fiction artist who revolutionised the genre.
Goseki Kojima - Japanese artist famous for illustrating the comic Lone Wolf and Cub.
Mike Mignola - US comic artist, creator of Hellboy.
Jean Giraud aka Mobieus - French comic artist, creator of Major Gruber and the airtight garage.
Daim – German new wave graffiti artist, founder of the Getting-Up studio.
Cope 2 – Old school graffiti artist, founding member of Kings Destroy crew.
Banksy – UK graffiti artist and stenciller extraordinaire.