Chet Zar

About

Chet Zar’s empathetic oil paintings of monsters invite viewers to connect with their “shadow sides.” Often set in a barren background, his portraits of monsters run the gamut from brooding to sad to humorous to contemplative to simply mysterious. What they have in common is their ability to beautifully convey emotion through the unlikely vehicle of monsters. Zar got his start in the special-effects field, creating three-dimensional creatures by hand for movies such as Hellboy and The Ring , and he’s also known for his work in music videos for the band Tool. When Zar first started selling his paintings in the early 2000s, there was not a huge market for them, but either he found his audience or the art world caught up with him. He has noted that the popularity that tattoos have attained over the last several years has likely played a role in the emerging popularity of Dark Art: the aesthetic of a lot of tattoo design is similar to that of Dark Art, and as more people have gotten tattoos, more people have been exposed to this type of art in general and have liked it. Still, Zar works hard to highlight the genre and give its artists and fans a home. His commitment to promoting Dark Art is an outgrowth of the documentary Chet Zar: I Like To Paint Monsters , which was made by Mike Correll. The documentary was intended to focus on Zar and his work, but it organically grew into a larger discussion about Dark Art. This led to Zar and Correll starting the Dark Art Society podcast series, which as of this writing has included 182 episodes. Zar has launched a cooperative devoted to the genre as well. While some may think of Dark Art as art which depicts horror or violence or is heavily influenced by the tropes of misunderstood Hollywood style occultism, for Zar, it is a broader genre with a far more universal meaning: Dark Art is a genre through which people can explore their fears, anxieties, experiences of loneliness, etc. Zar, born on November 12, 1967, has been exploring D