Thursday, October 18, 2012

Dealing with the Zombie Menace

"If you're NOT a flesh-eating thrall of undeath... Grunt ONCE."

Click on image for full size.
Just in time for Halloween, here's a painting I sketched up a few months ago.

I'm not quite the zombie fanatic that some of my friends are, but they have certainly inspired some fascinating work (early George Romero and the oeuvre of Max Brooks to name just two), the best of which are fun mirrors into our own society's fears. Perhaps not surprisingly, they usually suggest that those in our society mostly fear each other.

When I set out to make a zombie image, what interested me wasn't the zombie itself, but how it is manifested as a plague to be controlled. I tried to draw upon the dread that I felt when I saw photos in 2010 of Tsunami relief efforts in Nuclear-Disaster-stricken Fukushima prefecture, the mint-colored HAZMAT suits had a chilling unreality to them.

It reminded me that the color palette of most real disasters is the antiseptic tones of the equipment and clothing draping those responding to it.