Tom McKee

(statement by the artist).

My drawings have always been a highly personal, intuitive self examination. They are a running dialogue of self conflict and ridicule. From a very early age drawing was an attempt to make sense of the real world or create an alternate world more under my control. The emotional way I perceive reality is often anti-logical and contrary to the rational universe. My work was influenced by the angst ridden art of artists of the German Expressionists; the detail oriented work of the artists of the Renaissance in northern Europe and may other more main stream sources. Comics, underground comic and various other pulp magazines have also been important to the development of my images.

Television has also been a life-long obsession. As a child I can remember waking once a week to see the Flash Gordon serial with Buster Crab. Mexican Horror films such as the Rock and Roll Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy and low Budget films like the Wild World of the Fat Woman are a near obsession. I am a near compulsive hoarder of video tapes, then DVDs now Blu-Ray . The evolution of my characters came from the interaction of humans and animals which represent the higher and lower nature of man. The animals are the more bestial side of man. Robotic and more personalized machines are a reference to man as creator. Man creates machines in his own image, full of their own short comings. Frequent reference to characters such bug, rats and other vermin show the constant presence of corruption. Every cookie has a bug wing in it somewhere.

Tom McKee

The Henry Boxer Gallery will be showing several of Tom's extraordinary visionary art works at the next Outsider Fair in New York, in February 2011, the artist will also be featured in a show at the Orange Regional Museum in Australia at this time.