“Taunt Your Monster” says the title of one of Dan May’s images, and taunt them he does, in the process delighting us with a fascinating beastiary of odd flora and fauna. His creatures, monsters, occasional people and animal-like thingies inhabit charmingly odd environments that look like undersea landscapes or perhaps the ice caves of Muni Mula, or are often presented stark against backgrounds of big obvious brush strokes and textures of paint as paint.
May’s paintings carry echoes of Joan Miro and Yves Tanguy and he occasionally tips his hat to pop culture influences with tributes to the likes of Dr. Seuss and Tim Burton.
He works in acrylic on wood or canvas and varies between larger canvasses populated with multiple examples of his odd animals, plant things and and sometimes vaguely microbial or virus-like entities, and smaller works in which one or two are isolated.
May has worked extensively as an illustrator but now focuses more on painting and exhibiting as a gallery artist. His bio page includes a list of illustration clients and gallery exhibitions.
His web site includes two galleries that can be navigated by convenient arrows, sequence dots or by simply clicking on the images to move forward.
The link to “Blog” is actually to a Flickr space with multiple galleries that are considerably more extensive than the web site and includes blog-like entries on the main page.
There is an interview on LCSV4.
