- Dave McKean
- Over the course of a prolific artistic career that's spanned the past decade and a half, British mixed-media artist Dave McKean's striking and influential works have won him many awards, a worldwide following of fans and admirers, and a highly-respected reputation as an artist's artist. Underlying his many different artistic styles, accomplished in a variety of media — line-art, painting, model-building, photography, digital manipulation, typography, and all manner of combinations thereof — is a superb draftsmanship, a well-honed eye for detail, and an often whimsical, sometimes macabre imagination.
- While his painted art for the bestselling 1989 graphic novel Arkham Asylum introduced McKean to a mass audience, and his illustration work with longtime collaborator and friend Neil Gaiman (on graphic novels such as Violent Cases, Black Orchid, Signal To Noise, and Mr. Punch) established him as an unconventional visual storyteller and stylist, it was his distinctive work on the covers for the entire run of Gaiman's Sandman series for DC/Vertigo that truly cemented McKean's reputation. The Sandman covers, collected in the 1997 book Dust Covers, in addition to representing the body of work for which McKean is arguably now best-known, were largely responsible for visually conveying to readers the unique overall character and spirit of the Sandman series — dark, magical, quirky, haunting, dreamlike — all qualities with which McKean's work has come to be associated.
- Although McKean's roots lie in comics, his talents have expanded to encompass the realms of fine art, commercial art, photo illustration, filmmaking, and graphic design.
- Current Dave McKean news may be found at Colony Media - and
Allen Spiegel Fine Arts
- Dave McKean has illustrated several award winning comics including ARKHAM ASYLUM (with author/playwrite Grant Morrison), SIGNAL TO NOISE and MR. PUNCH (with author Neil Gaiman). He has written as well as illustrated two books, CAGES and PICTURES THAT TICK, and has created hundreds of comic and book covers (including the hugely popular SANDMAN
series).
- Dave has also created ad campaigns for NIKE, KODAK, MINI, BT, EUROSTAR, SMIRNOFF and the Government's recent SOCIAL WORK scheme, as well as over 150 CD packages for Michael Nyman, Tori Amos, Counting Crows, Frontline Assembly, Bill Laswell, Bill Bruford and Alice Cooper amongst
others.
- He has worked on a variety of book and film projects with John Cale, The Rolling Stones, Milcho Manchevski, Stephen King, Lars Von Trier and Iain Sinclair. As well as everything else, he is currently directing and designing films, illustrating childrens books and running the jazz record label FERAL.
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