Born in the U.K. and now residing in Canada, Dan Seagrave began his career with an album cover for a local band. That expanded into a series of notable covers for other bands, though within a specific genre.
Seagrave has continued to produce art for music groups, but his intricate, intensely detailed and highly imaginative art has spawned a market for posters, reproductions and appearances in books and magazines. He is also in demand for painting murals, including a 20 x 20 foot (6 x 6 m) ceiling painting for the Hard Rock Cafe in Ottawa.
He normally works in acrylic on panels, for the pieces shown above at a size of 24 x 36 inches (61 x 91 cm). The images on his website are frustratingly small, given the size and level of detail in his work, though he does provide a detail view feature for many pieces that allows you to scroll around a larger image in a small window, as for the detail images above. Be sure to check out the Temple Series, as well as the Posters and Store sections.
(Note: when visiting Seagrave’s website, if the site doesn’t automatically open a secondary pop-up window with the actual content, click on the “Dan Seagrave” heading.)
There are also images on the the beinArt Surreal Art Collective, but the best are probably the images on the Tor.com site,. These are a bit larger and give you a somewhat better taste of what the full images look like.
Seagrave uses curved perspective, freeform distortions, atmospheric perspective, a refined command of texture, and judicious applications of bright color within otherwise controlled palettes to create his beautifully rendered whirls of controlled chaos.
In an interview on Voices From the Dark Side, Seagrave indicates that his Temple series paintings are part of an ongoing series, and may even be the basis for a film; though I’m hoping that in the interim some of his work finds its way into a print collection.
