I just discovered the graphic, fanciful, visceral and just wonderful paintings of Crystal Barbre, many of which can be seen on her website’s gallery page. Her blog hasn’t been updated in a couple of years so I won’t send you there, but she does have a few prints for sale here on her store page. I especially love that you can buy a print of the mural she did for Seattle bar The Rabbit Hole. She’s also on Twitter here. I’m now a huge fan. Snip:
The Rabbit Hole mural is located at 2222 2nd Avenue at The Rabbit Hole in Seattle, Wa. Crystal was commissioned to paint a mural for the back of the bar in 2012. The wall was scanned with a special process by Bellevue Fine Art Reproduction, allowing for the creation of smaller fine art prints.
I originally found her on Empty Kingdom, which seems to have fallen apart after they tried to do a blog renovation last year, though a quick search brings up a more recent profile of Barbre on Beautiful Decay (another of my favorite art blogs). Lindsey Rae Gjording writes,
Crystal Barbre, a Seattle painter, has created an alternate universe where women call the shots, their raw glory shining prominently through the head of an animal. These hungry scenes, at first glance, just look like a skillfully painted playground of lust: voluptuous animal-headed women in the throes of passion, yet there is much more at work here.
(…) They are eternally present, and they engage with their sexuality while remaining a powerful, wild, and even threatening figure. Theriocephaly, or, the condition of having the head of an animal, dates back to Greek mythology and is often used in art and storytelling as a symbolic element…
