I love this painting, but I don’t know if anybody else will!
The whole point of this picture was to have an excuse to paint that horrifying monster, which looks like a plucked chicken with a big screaming cat-mouth on the breast. I accidentally designed it a couple of years ago, while I was working on a logo for my brother, and it always makes me laugh. So I wanted to give it a little bit of love, with some Godzilla-style action.
Fight Meat Dance Battle Go! required an adversary, and that’s how the red meat monster was born. All my earlier iterations of the chicken monster were pen and ink drawings; when I imagined a color version, I had always pictured the slightly translucent pink of a raw chicken. But I wanted a stronger color contrast with the red meat monster, and at some point I realized that a pink raw chicken monster would be too gross.
But blue… now there’s a color of chicken monster that never made a little kid burst into tears! I tried to present my meat monsters in a playful way, battling in a stylized world of model buildings and high-contrast backdrops.
Connections:
The red meat monster was new to me, so I decided to explore his history a bit with Meat Monster Sophomore Yearbook Photo.
Another version of the chicken monster appears in Escape, but this one is green and has at least two additional limbs! That canvas also reuses the ‘rising sun’ alternating ray motif in the background.
And the cityscape in which our monsters are battling looks eerily similar to the set design for Lava Monster in the Morning!
