About
D.C. Maddox is an American artist best known for his striking surrealistic landscapes, particularly of humans and animals fused with futuristic machinery. This “otherworld” is a threatening and enchanting place where anything can and does happen. Technology and organic life blend into a sort of primordial soup, and all manner of strange and unknowable creatures call this place home.
Maddox’s dreamscapes are uninhabited wastelands with long-abandoned structures, rusting and silent. Alien forests, gestating with bizarre life, as well as caverns, dungeons, and nightmare laboratories. It’s a place of gloom and dark colors — brown, black, ochre, burnt umber — with occasional splashes of bright colors which strive against the darkness.
He brings these extraordinary visions to life using a wide variety of traditional and non-traditional painting techniques which employ acrylics, inks, oils, airbrush, watercolors, charcoal, and pastels. Additionally, D.C. Maddox also creates industrial organic art, which is a blend of experimental painting techniques, sculptural elements, and a unique form of assemblage art.
“If there are beautiful lies mixed in with ugly truths, if it becomes impossible to separate the absurd and grotesque and baroque from the clinical and provable, then perhaps I’m doing something right.”
Music has always played an important role in Maddox’s creative process, and he creates generative electronic soundscapes inspired by, or which serve as inspiration for, his paintings. He combines field recordings with sounds from hand built modular synthesizers to produce a type of dark ambient musique concrète.
After serving in the military, Maddox earned a bachelor’s degree in Multimedia Design and thereafter studied art at the New Masters Academy.
Today, Maddox continues his explorations into the surreal from his studio on the southern coast of the US.