Vitaly S. Alexis: Romantically Apocalyptic
By Angela Roberts
December 6, 2010
Russian-born digital artist, Vitaly S. Alexis, has quickly become known for his beautiful and mystical paintings that blend an intriguing imagination with an incredible understanding of light and shadow. His subjects are mostly speculative in nature, and he is most famous for his painting, “Seasonscape,” which has been downloaded more than a million times. His paintings blend colour, light, and shadow to create fantastical landscapes so detailed and realistic that they nearly leap off the page (or the screen).
Vitaly’s artistic career started out when he was only eleven years old; his parents enrolled him in an art school in then-Soviet Russia. He describes these years as “the best time of my life”. His first sale was at the age of fourteen of a mountain landscape oil painting to a real estate agent. He moved to Toronto in 1997, where he developed his skills as an artist and found his chosen medium; Photoshop. Since then, he’s been working as a photographer and illustrator, creating artwork for book covers, graphic novels, cards, posters, and CD covers. He also illustrates his own web comic and upcoming TV show, Romantically Apocalyptic, about three survivors of a nuclear holocaust and their adventures in a devastated world. It’s a project he says he’s wanted to do for a long time, but didn’t know how to go about it because his “art is very detailed and each painting takes forever to make”. You can believe this when you look at it; each panel has been rendered with a care and skill that is astounding. He uses tools like green screen photography to produce the comic at a pace of one to two pages a week; an impressive schedule considering the quality of each image.
Vitaly’s influences are wide-ranging; he gets inspired by everything he sees. His favourite video game is S.T.A.L.K.E.R, favourite book is Metro 2033, and his favourite artists are Ivan Aivazovsky and Salvador Dali. S.T.A.L.K.E.R and Metro 2033 are both Russian post-apocalyptic works, the former a first-person-shooter and the latter an influential science fiction novel. Both highlight Vitaly’s interest in the post-apocalyptic. In the works of Ivan Aivazovsky, we can see his tutelage in the art of light and shadow, both he and the 19th century artist sharing an interest in portraying sweeping landscapes in a subtle and detailed manner. But Vitaly also states that his greatest influences come from his “journeys around the world, photography of beautiful models, and search for abandoned places, forgotten by people and time”. There is a sense of this in his paintings, and also in his landscape photography, which is filled with dizzying views of places that seem impossible. He captures the haunting imagery of abandoned places and makes them mythical.
His advice to new artists is simple; “Never give up. Draw more than ten hours a day. Don’t be afraid of showing your work everywhere.” Sage advice from an accomplished artist.
Some more of his work, including his famed painting, "Seasonscape":
Seasonscape
Machinery of the Stars
Delphian Calamity
To see more of Vitaly's work, click on this link.
And his web comic, Romantically Apocalyptic.