About
D.C. Maddox is an American artist best known for his striking surrealistic landscapes, particularly of humans and animals fused with futuristic machinery and strange creatures. This “otherworld” is a threatening and enchanting place where anything can and does happen and the impossible has become the norm. Technology and organic life become indistinguishable.
Maddox’s dreamscapes are uninhabited wastelands with long-abandoned structures, rusting and silent, alien forests, gestating with bizarre life, 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. These unknowable realms are both inimitably strange and hauntingly familiar, as are the grotesque and fantastic beasts and chimeras who call this place home.
Maddox brings these extraordinary visions to life using a wide variety of experimental painting techniques which employ acrylics, inks, oils, airbrush, and mixed media compositions. In addition, he creates works that combine paintings with sculptural elements and old computer components, producing a kind of futuristic “electro-organic” 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.