BIOGRAPHY
SHOWDEER {shōw-deer] aka CHRIS BIGALKE is a self-taught artist and has been drawing for as long as he can remember. He started painting on canvas in the early 2000s and has been creating digital artwork in his unique illustrative/collage style for over 15 years starting in 2008.
Experimenting with digital art started with MS Paint in the mid 90s and then with Photoshop on a Power Mac G4 in 2006. For years after, he used hand-me-down Acer PC laptops that could barely run Photoshop but he got them to work and only utilizing the trackpad with his fingers to create art. Years later he finally bought a proper MacBook Pro and started designing digitally consistently and continuing to use only his fingers on the trackpad to paint and design art digitally to this day until he started using iPad’s Procreate. His career started in 2008 with designing gig posters for bands and music venues in Portland, Oregon.
The main collection of the first digital fine art pieces from Showdeer were created while involved in the party and music scene of Portland, Oregon in the late 2000s until the covid pandemic in 2020 when all concerts halted as well as gig-poster production. This is when he started painting again. Then NFTs exploded in 2021 and he began creating the final couple hundred pieces from 2021 til 2023 to round off the collection.
At one point in Portland during the party scene in 2007 after being fired from a night job he ended up broke and homeless living in a tent in his friend’s backyard while hanging out at the local bar Billy Ray’s Tavern drinking $1 Pabst and buying buy-one-get-one free burgers at Burgerville so he could use their internet to create digital collages all day. After a few months of this, luckily he was asked to book bands at a small club by a bartender friend of his because of their shared taste in music and started booking and designing posters for the shows even though there was no budget for them or himself. After designing approx. 200+ crude band posters on the house and paid in beer and whiskey, he got better and his style evolved into a sort of retro-psychedelic and surreal collage style using found vintage imagery combined with a gritty pastel color palette. The posters were reminiscent of screen printed concert posters that he loved and was trying to emulate digitally. Mostly by using a painterly approach as well as creating his own textures and distressed brushes to gain this effect. Not sure if anyone else has done this before, trying to emulate screen printed posters digitally or if he was perhaps the first.
His unique style and vibe of art was inspired by these screen printed gig-posters he revered, the nostalgia of old royalty-free vintage images, engravings and illustrations, as well as his reminiscent youth playing on the beaches of Southern California and newly exploring the lush forests and landscapes of the Pacific Northwest and especially his new home Oregon. These elements mixed together ultimately became his unique signature and very recognizable style in the Pacific Northwest music and art scene. The style was so unique and recognizable he began noticing copycats and his color palette being used to promote all things Pacific Northwest. He inspired many other artists and even some to this day who still are influenced by his surrealist approach, color palette and textures. People would always comment; “His concert posters weren’t just posters, but they were Art.”.
“People would always comment his concert posters weren’t just posters, but they were Art.”
Soon after and months later, local bands and large music venues began to take notice of him and were asking him to design posters for shows in Portland, Seattle and beyond. This request for his work never stopped for the entire fifteen years working as a freelance artist. So much so he never had to seek out work as he was always in demand.
A couple years later in 2013, after receiving so many requests for his work, he was able to quit his regular day job of booking bands and creating posters as a side-hustle, not only to becoming a full-time fully-fledged and established freelance artist designing gig posters, but also creating art for advertising, billboards, murals, album covers, cannabis products and beer labels, and becoming one of the most sought-after and prolific artists in the Pacific Northwest specifically.
After digitally designing and hand-drawing hundreds of posters for local bands as well as large national acts touring all over the world including; Wilco, Built To Spill, Guided By Voices, The War on Drugs, Mudhoney, Meat Puppets, Youth Lagoon, Oneohtrix Point Never, plus many more, as well as working with large corporate clients Red Bull, Pabst, Lagunitas, Universal, LucasFilm and Star Wars, he also started painting large-scale murals for breweries (largest was 102 x 10 feet for Lagunitas) and continued to design beer labels for local breweries until he focused all attention on minting his Genesis Collection to the blockchain for posterity.
PROCESS / VISION / MISSION
SHOWDEER’S ARTISTIC PROCESS of achieving his unique and unmistakable surrealistic and dreamlike illustrative and collage-like art style was created by starting with a couple found images and playing around with thoughts, concepts, narratives and color palettes. He utilized vibrant yet faded pastel color palettes chosen at random, effectively and creatively transforming and intentionally giving back life to a multitude of mostly found public domain antique Victorian-era vintage imagery, some cc0 and licensed images and photos, retro and antique illustrations and engravings plus some images from books, while incorporating many illustrative, drawing and texture brushes with collage and illustrative techniques exclusively in Photoshop and changing the imagery so much that his own style begins to appear and it becomes a Showdeer piece of art.
All of these pieces in his first Genesis Collection (First mint Feb 15th, 2021 - Until 2023) were created in this illustrative/collage style. Except for new collections Showdeer II (digitally hand drawn and painted on iPad in an illustrative and painterly style), Showdeer Paintings (painted on canvas with acrylic) and his new pieces dropping on Makersplace and Nifty Gateway which are unique digital oil painting style on iPad.
HIS VISION was to digitally recreate the feeling and look of the screen printed concert posters he loved mixed with elements of the historic master artists he is obsessed by. He explored specific ideas, concepts and subject matter in each piece that deal with questions of what reality really is and how certain images and colors can effect mood and thoughts. By utilizing all of these elements and techniques in Photoshop he was able to confidently orchestrate images, composition, colors, textures and narratives all together in a painterly and collage like fashion until the vision is reached. In doing so he is not only able to intuitively create unique color palettes and exquisite compositions but also by using the many layers of weathered, worn and distressed textures and filters he realizes his vision of a completely warm and beautiful world of inescapable feelings of nostalgia while offering psychedelic and dreamlike narratives to explore. Many of the narratives of his visions deal with the duality of existence, the harmonious balance of dark and light, the apocalypse, spiritual awakenings, parallel realties, alternate dimensions, dreams and the subconscious thoughts of human experiences and existence while we all travel on this speeding sphere traversing though space and time. While most of these pieces will at first give off a fun and lively initial experience upon first viewing, looking closer you are able to start to recognize darker elements within the ideas of some of the art. This is done naturally but on purpose to show the duality of life. The beauty and the darkness. The pieces radiate the balance and dichotomy of the duality of this world both the positive and the negative. He will use historical images of skulls to represent mortality or assemblages of flowers and plants to showcase beauty and life.
HIS ARTISTIC MISSION is to create images that bring about a feeling of familiar nostalgia and evoke a sense of experiencing a place you’ve never been to, or someone else’s dreams of someone you may have never met. Some people use the words anemoia or saudade to describe this feeling. Others have described his art as “controlled chaos” or “an explosion of surrealistic cotton candy colors” or “a magic garden after bloom”.
STYLE / INFLUENCES
IN DEVELOPING HIS STYLE which appeared to him organically from producing hundreds of pieces of digital artwork, many of his influences started to appear and influence his pieces sub-consciously. His influences are vast and range from a multitude of historical artists and time periods in history. The first influence was Disney and 80s cartoons and then discovering the art movement of the surrealists featuring Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst. Many other influences speak in his work as well including, the use of bold saturated colors from Matisse and fauvism, to the striking colors and compositions of Van Gogh and Vermeer. The surreal inquisitive minds of Bosch, to Magritte, to also the freedom and experimentation of Andy Warhol and the energy of Basquiat. As well as the modern pop-surrealists The Clayton Brothers, Joe Sorren and Mark Ryden. Influences also were greatly influenced from absurdist and surrealist filmmakers like Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam as well as historical time-periods from the Victorian era to Pop art.
PRESENT / FUTURE
SINCE FEBRUARY 15TH, 2021 the main Genesis 1k Collection has now reached over 387 eth volume traded and is currently being migrated onto his new artist ran contract. This was all possible without the gimmickry of creating derivatives from other art, without pandering in direct messages to big collectors or curators, without creating the false value of a brand token, without fake hype or corny salesman or scammer-like tactics, without speaking in twitter spaces for forced farming engagement and without the help of any curated platforms. All of his success and growth was gained 100% independently and organically through interacting directly with his 1800+ unique collectors on Twitter and in his discord. Collectors include the biggest collector in the space; Cozomo Medici as well as Keith Grossman (President of TIME Magazine/Moonpay) and Mark Cuban.
After finally feeling ready and deciding to apply to his favorite curated platform of choice after almost two years being active every single day in this new digital market, Showdeer was accepted and verified on the reputable and premier curated platform MakersPlace. And then also quickly onboarded to the legendary marketplace Nifty Gateway.
Now Showdeer currently resides and works in his art studio in Los Angeles, California, digitally painting fine artworks for these respected curated platforms as well as oil painting on canvas for collectors and galleries.
Showdeer is an Official TIME Magazine TIMEPieces Artist.