Ken Crost Digital Fine Art

​Recently, I’ve started creating artworks that fall into that dystopian box. The first of these artwork series, The Spirit Travelers of the Southwest, is shown here – works that bring to mind fifteenth/sixteenth century artist Hieronymus Bosch and his works of hell on earth.

Although my artworks, by design, don’t go nearly as far a Bosch’s works, they have at their heart, the deformities of the flesh. While most digital artists working with the human form strive to make these human figures as perfect as possible, I have gone in a totally different direction, I’ve embraced the deformities that occur in these works. I don’t try to hide them or fix them.

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Spirit Travelers of the Southwest

 

The world that humanity knew for thousands of years no longer exists. Starting in 2001, the idea of permanent war began to grip the world in its claws of death. This idea ran unabated until the year 2146 when the final war of the world forced humanity back to the brink of hunter-gatherers. Yes, there were pockets of the modern world still lurking on the edges, but for the most part the world could no longer be called modern. Even a term like post-modern doesn’t seem apropos for the humans who are grinding out their meager existence. So, across the globe humans formed bonds with other humans and these small groups became the new normal for human society. Some settled in what seemed like safe environments and tried their best to eke out a decent existence, while others decided to live a more nomadic lifestyle. 

One such group of nomadic humans is known as the Spirit Travelers of the Southwest. These small bands of humans can be found wandering the landscape of what used to be Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada, in search of food, shelter, and the connection that comes from people who are linked together by their common suffering. On occasion, these groups gather in large numbers, commiserate with each other for a few days, and then move on to continue their never-ending search for some holy grail that will help them discover a way out of their ongoing misery. 

But there is no holy grail, at least not on this planet earth. So, these small bands have had to develop a fierce attitude toward those they consider outsiders. As they learned too often, the outsiders have no interest in playing nice. Even though these bands of travelers are mostly peace loving, they can turn in a second and become like a rattlesnake who’s been disturbed from his hiding place.