SHOWDEER is the moniker for the digital fine artwork project of artist Chris Bigalke. He has been drawing for as long as he can remember, started painting on canvas in early 2000s and has been creating artwork in this digital illustrative/collage style for over 15 years. He started experimenting with digital art with MS Paint in the mid 90s and then Photoshop on a Power Mac G4 in 2006. A few years later he bought a MacBook and started designing digitally consistently. His career started in 2008 with designing gig posters for bands and music venues in Portland, Oregon.

The unique surrealist illustrative digital collage style of Showdeer’s art effectively and creatively utilizes a vibrant yet faded pastel color palette with found vintage imagery, illustrative techniques and weathered and worn textures to create a warm and beautiful world of inescapable feelings of nostalgia while offering psychedelic and dreamlike narratives to explore. The process of achieving this unique style of digital art is created by utilizing a multitude of vintage images, many layers, textures and filters, plus illustrative techniques all created digitally exclusively in Photoshop. Except for his new collection Surrealisms which is all digitally hand drawn on iPad with no collage elements.

 Most pieces have a fun and lively initial experience upon viewing but looking closer you are able to recognize darker elements within the ideas of some of the pieces. His style was equally inspired by recreating the feeling and look of screen printed concert posters he loved so much and the master artists he is obsessed by. His artistic mission is to create images that 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”.

 His artistic influences range from Dalí and Warhol, to Matisse and Vermeer, Van Gogh to Basquiat, to the Clayton Brothers and Mark Ryden, and from the Victorian era, to fauvism to surrealism, and from pop art to pop-surrealism, etc.