Ireland has been an important source of excellent bands, bloggers and inspiration for CVLT Nation so far. I have not traveled there yet, but when I come across people like Paul McCarroll, it motivates me all the more to make the trip. McCarroll is a digital painter of unsurpassed talent, and with his digital tools he creates imagery that passes before your eyes once and stays in your brain forever. For those of you unfamiliar with digital painting (as I was before I stumbled across his work), it is painting done directly to your computer canvas, for example in Photoshop. No tricks or shortcuts, just using digital brushes and tools to paint your masterpiece instead of the physical oils and canvas. As someone who has used Photoshop for many years, and messed around with the paint brushes on my own compositions, let’s just say my paintings never turned out like this. McCarroll uses light and shading in a genius way to develop highly detailed textures on all of his subjects. One of my favorite series he did for his own band, Scald, for their 2006 album Vermiculatus. It features a family – mother, child and father – all dismembered in various ways, but all joined by veins – the combination of creepiness and connectivity is perfect. Many of his pieces revolve around human interconnectivity, in both beautiful and terrifying ways. There are a lot of infiltrated orifices in McCarroll’s artwork, but rather than being invasive or offensive, these connections are suggestive of profound ideas about human society. From his imagery, I get the sense that he is illustrating the calculated breeding of ideas and dependencies that create the power structures that rule our societies. Whatever the case, his artwork is truly mind-blowing, and I strongly suggest you check out the gallery of Paul McCarroll’s paintings assembled after the jump…
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