Tuesday, May 25, 2010

David Galletly

Sorry I'm late, let's talk art! Alec's friend brought this guy to my attention and for that, I am very thankful. Pretty neat, right? Well, according to his site/portfolio, "David Galletly is a freelance artist, illustrator and graphic designer living and working in Stirling, Scotland. He graduated with a degree in graphic design in 2004. David has exhibited throughout the UK, Europe and the USA." From that description, David really seems to be living the kind of life I am gravitating towards, so to see his stuff is really cool on a personal level, for me. That being said, I'm certain his work can be appreciated by most anyone. When I first saw the work on his site, I could not rid myself of mental images of the work of Marc Johns and Nicholas Di Genova. If you're familiar with their work, I'm sure you'd agree that there are some stylistic similarities, though they are still distinctly different.
I think this picture pretty well epitomizes the combination of Marc Johns' quiet simplicity and Di Genova's complex juxtapositions of simple patterns. A notable difference is the plausibility of the subjects that Galletly features, compared to Johns and Di Genova. That might sound strange, but most of his pictures are of pretty normal stuff, whereas you'd find antlered men and bird guns with the other two.This is not to his discredit by any means, because he demonstrates a pretty clear capacity for drawing strange things. Evidence:
Bam. This picture brings me to something I really like about his illustrations. Gallenty has managed to incorporate some pretty playful colors that you don't often see done in a tasteful way. Really, it's just red and blue, but in a very pleasant combination that serve to clarify his purpose - notice the distinct areas of red and blue in the picture above. I can't really say a whole lot about the deeper side to his work because for the life of me, I can't see it, myself. It might have something to do with the relatively small number of pieces on his site, and if not, that's art, right? Sometimes you just don't get it.

I hope you like what you've seen, and maybe you can make some more sense of it than I could.
Enjoy,

-Daniel

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