Artists We Love: Chris Slabber

INTERVIEWED BY Lindi Brownell Meiring

When we heard that artist, illustrator, designer (and musician, while we’re at it) was the only South African to win at the 2015 A’Design Awards in Italy, we thought it was about time we caught up with him to find out more. 

How and when did you start illustrating?

I was always drawing at school, but didn’t really know what I was doing. It was only until my second year of Graphic Design at CPUT that I really started exploring more mediums, which eventually led to me combining photography, hand illustrations and digital technology. Since then I’ve just been experimenting with new ways to improve what I’ve been doing.

Describe your aesthetic in three words.

Surreal. Colourful. Illusion.

You’re the only South African to have won gold and silver at the 2015 A’Design Awards in Italy. Tell us about the projects you entered.

The Gold award was for the album artwork I recently did for a band called We Set Sail. The interesting thing about them is the fact that they are instrumental. This gave me a lot of space to really tap into the essence of the music. The album is called Animal, which gave me the idea of using spirit animals to convey the band’s contrasting compositions. I worked with Dirk Steenkamp from Everfelt Photography as my studio photographer. It was quite a messy shoot, as we were throwing paint at a dancer/model for four hours. For the post-production process I had to select the cover image, ‘find’ the animal within the cloud of powder paint and then extrude it.

The Silver award was for an exhibition I had in 2014. The series is called Destruction / Creation. I photographed paint falling into water and afterwards built faces into them using Photoshop. It sounds easy, but it was quite the process to get the results I wanted. As with We Set Sail’s artwork, I had to find the faces within the paint cloud. It’s basically days just staring at a few images until you can start seeing the contours of the facial features. The idea behind the series was to show that from Destruction comes Creation or new life. As the paint falls, it’s constantly evolving into new shapes and colours, while on the other hand, it’s constantly dissolving.

As a musician yourself, how does music influence your designs (especially in relation to your award-winning design for We Set Sail)?

Music does influence my work for sure. I’m quite a spiritual person, so since we are 70% water, we are easily affected by frequencies, which is essentially music. With regards to We Set Sail’s artwork, it was quite an intense process of finding the right execution. As I mentioned, the music is very contrasting. I kept seeing a dancer in my head every time I listened to the album, but I wanted to give it that extra push. That’s where the paint came in.

Do you have any new projects coming up?

Recently I signed a contract with the NBA in New York to do illustration work for their teams and players. At the moment we are busy with the playoff season. It’s still just on the entry-level side, but I’m hoping to build a good relationship with them. Then I’m busy working on a new exhibition for the end of June. It’s a group exhibition at a gallery (Art Karoo) in my local town of Oudtshoorn. The exhibition theme is Lumen | Obscurum. So, it’s the whole play between light and darkness. I have my concept in order, I just need to find my final model. It’s going to be a photography-based piece with very subtle manipulation. It takes place on 23 June 2015.

View more of Chris’s work at behance.net.