should be familiar with the cre- ative force that is Chet Zar.We’ve featured him numerous times in these pages, including in
RM#100 for our Nightmare Gallery col- lection, where we asked him to submit a piece based on a personal nightmare. As it turns out, he’s been channelling real night terrors ever since childhood, and the cover of his new book features one of his most famous renderings. The painting that book is named for, titled Black Mag- ick, depicts a spectral being sporting a top hat, fleshy gas mask and a rusty gun, who stares ominously back at us, as cu- rious and frightened as we are. “I think Black Magick is my signature
painting at this point,” Zar allows. “It came to me in a flash, completely out of nowhere, and that rarely happens for me.” Similarly, the book’s
design is a thing of oth- erworldly beauty. Each painting, captured by fine-art photographer Larry Underhill, is pre- sented on thick, matte black stock, with a spot of varnish enhancing each selection. It fea- tures an introduction by Guillermo del Toro, a spread of tattoos based on Zar’s work with words by tattoo artist Paul Booth, and a personal note by Zar about his inspirational stepfather James Zar, who’s an accomplished painter in his own right. If the 44-year-old artist seems to have
some high-profile friends, that’s because by his mid-teens he was working at the studios of legendary effect artists Bill Sturgeon and Rick Baker. Zar is credited with sculpting Hellboy’s Right Hand of Doom for Hellboy, and del Toro asked his production team to reference Zar’s art for
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the many creatures that inhabit Hellboy II. While working in the effects world, Zar also befriended Adam Jones, fellow effects artist and guitarist for Tool. Jones had him develop creatures and concepts for the band’s music videos, as well as visuals for their records and live shows. His art has become synony- mous with the group ever since. For the last five years, however, Zar
has been making a big splash in the fine-art world, thanks to his unique monster portraits. They convey rot and repulsion, but rather than forcing us to look away, they invite us to gaze deeper. The pieces often make us pon- der our own anxieties, fears and, ulti- mately, mortality. “I think that artists are generally
outsiders and monsters represent the outsider and how it feels to be an out- sider – at least mine do, hopefully. It seems like a natural fit,” says Zar. Zar’s future proj-
ects include an up- coming tour for the book, an annual sculp- ture show that he cu- rates, called Conjoined, and a documentary on
him, which just wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign. It took a while, but the artist has finally come into his own on the strength of his nightmare can- vases. “I work a lot more and a lot harder
now,” he admits, “but it feels like it mat- ters more than working exclusively on other people’s projects. With each new piece I feel like I am working for my fu- ture. It is a lot more fulfilling.”