The top painting, "Architeuthis Dux" by Mark Atomos Pilon, is currently on display at La Luz de Jesus Gallery. I showed it to Mark Frauenfelder and he instantly grabbed our fave illustrator Tim Biskup's Gama-Go 31 Postcards book and flipped it to the second image seen here, titled "Squid Attack." (Apologies for poor reproduction.) Jules Verne, meet the Pop Surrealists!
Link to Pilon page at La Luz, Link to Biskup site
UPDATE: Mark Atomos Pilon sends us this email that he sent to Tim Biskup, a version of which he also posted on the Pig Work blog's comments area. (Mark says the misspelling of Biskup's last name in the Pig Work post was a spellcheck error.):
I agree that there is a grey line between lifting and inspiration. Having been a victim of this in the recent past I have to agree that it's a painful discovery to find another artist lifting pieces of your work and moving it around in their own fashion. Myself, I firmly plant my feet in a stance of never sourcing other artists' artwork for inspiration for my own work. I always draw blind when I work. In this case I drew this piece after seeing my friend Ryan Heshka's painting of a "giant squid" at a recent art show. I promptly went home and drew the "Architeuthis-Dux" artwork. Not from a copy of a Tim Biskup postcard but from my own inspiration and my love of Jules Verne and science fiction. If you are familiar with my past work you would see that I have painted quite a few submarines in my 10-year history as a painter. Some of the subs bear resemblance to the Biskup submarine due to its long perspective. None of which I might add where based on Tim Biskup's work. In this particular piece I simply added a squid to an existing sub to humor my own need for a variation on the submarine theme that I've already painted so often.
My apologies to Tim Biskup if he's offended by the similarities in our work but I can only impress that there is a possibility of inspiration here, but it definitely was not copied directly from the Tim Biskup artwork. I'm trying my best to carve out a style that I can call my own. I think that's all any artist can ever hope for.
