Ben Strickland -- Fantastic Metaphors

The chief lesson I chose to take away from art school involved a hearty respect for symbol and metaphor as tools of expression, a lesson that was nicely suited to my fondness of fantasy and science fiction. If these genres are to be of any use to us, they would do well to serve as a screen for the mundane rational world of matter and sense-data. Dragons, grails, fairies, and even magic rings are meant to hold some implicit meaning for us to carry about as we go on with our lives. If I'm wrong, then I'm not only wasting my time, but our mothers were right to throw out our comic-books when we weren't looking.

Pretensions aside, I get a kick out of juxtaposing the conventionally beautiful with the conventionally ugly. It's a short trip from beauteous damsels and dragons to models and bats, models and spiders, and so forth.

When I'm not trying to make art, write stories, or both, I try to maintain my status as a permanent literature student. Though I sometimes flatter myself that following art and literature is a noble pursuit, it actually just beats the heck out of workin'.

Visit Ben's Web site to see more of his artwork.