Chris Simonite's Cubo-Weirdism Blog! A Blog about Chris Simonite's Art by Chris Simonite. Who the Hell else?

A few years ago I was in one of my favourite cities, a little place called Montreal, and I walked past a commercial gallery in the Old Port where I saw some work that looked like it was right up my alley. Unfortunately I couldn't go in and look at it because the gallery was closed, but I could see it pretty well from the outside. The work in question had a pop-art bent to it, and "bent" is a good word for it because it's a similar word to 'twisted' and this pop-art was pretty twisted indeed! It was work [...]

Okay, that was kind of a long title for this post, but what the hell? So I'll start by saying that most of my success in making sales over the last year or so has been through Instagram. But I am re-thinking my strategies. For example, I'm told that people like to see real-time painting videos and I do want to make some of those. But I've had some technical issues with making them, and I'm working on a fix for that. Stay tuned. Also, I will be making more 'guitar plus art videos', which you may have seen on my [...]

I know I've mentioned before that about one in ten of my paintings just doesn't work. I bring this up because it happened again this past week. In fact it happened twice. Last week I decided it was time to do a Cubo-Weirdist portrait of Black Widow as portrayed by Scarlet Johansson. The process for doing these paintings begins with a quick sketch that is basically a caricature. And when I say quick, I mean quick. I don't like to spend a lot of time on the sketch because I want to get to the painting. Why you ask? I seem to [...]

Last week my wife shared some feedback she received from one of her co-workers who had had a look at my work. This co-worker apparently said that she found my paintings "powerful" and that they actually "scared" her. This does not sound like a positive reaction to my work, but that's okay. I know not everyone wants my work hanging in their living room, though it sure would be nice if they did! But I gotta say: I never thought of my cubist-inspired work as "powerful" or "scary". I generally think of it as interesting, sometimes amusing, sometimes fun and maybe [...]