Glen Orbik

Earlier in the week, I had mentioned Glen Orbik. I find it appropriate to take a look at one of his images since his name is fresh in everyone's minds (or at least in the minds of the people that read the Lipking post). As I flip through my Spectrums, I come across a few artists whose style makes me think, "I really would like to paint like that." Glen Orbik is one of those artists. Having an oeuvre comprising of monsters, aliens, noir, pulp, vikings, etc, Orbiks work interests me. Plus, as we have discussed this week, his work is filled with painterly brush strokes. This piece has a number of interesteding qualities to it that are work noting. For one, the background is made up of very flat, neutral color shapes. They almost appear as cardboard cutouts, but what I think Mr. Orbik was going for was to create a stark contrast between the backup and the horseman. With the high contrast, high detail saturated color, the foreground horseman pushed significantly more forward than the flattened, more neutral background. Looking again at brush strokes, we can see the soft-edged blur effect of the strokes in the tail, the hooves, the flying dirt mounds and parts of the cape. Not much more to say on this one. It has been a rough week...