Artist15: Keith Thompson

Each of illustrator Keith Thompson's images are pieces of a worlds he or others are working to design. Like a wood carver crafting pawn, knights, and queens for a chess set, Thompson's creations show actors and environments in his fictional universe, contributing to a rich and developing atmosphere of war and plague all being experienced by a diverse set of races, cultures, and individuals. Each of his illustrations on his website is given a story and explanation. These blurbs, sometimes entire pages long, are as much a part of Thompson's art as the illustrations themselves. Each piece of context and story, often as strange and grotesquely formed as the images depicted, serves to further fill out the growing universe inhabited by his art. Some examples from his site:

                                      GIANTS
Giants are a sad race. Hunted endlessly for the fearsome presence they impose, they are unable to congregate and form any semblance of community. Their huge statures create a demand for food that they can never meet. Constantly malnourished, they are forced to scavenge and raid small settlements and outlying farmsteads, which only acts to further daemonise them. While physiologically they have the capability to match humans in intelligence, they are invariably rendered feral and moronic by social isolation and a lack of sufficient nutrition. Giants are ostracised by their fellow Fey Folk for their bestial decline, and fearfully butchered by all others. Adorned in the pillaged accoutrements of a culture that glorifies those who slay his kind, this giant masks his face and binds his scarred and oft-besieged feet with the shields of felled soldiers. Stooped and bowed by gravity, the giant has become victimized by the fear his size instills.



                                  VIRAEMIA
The civilised world lies on its knees, a sickness wracking its body. The affliction causes a necrotising of tissues so perfectly uniform in distribution that victims take on the appearance of corpses long before death occurs due to organ failure or secondary infections. The crumbling remnants of academia swing from fatalistic resignation to maddened optimism in their addressment of what could be done to fight the sickness.
The vast numbers of doctors attempting to stem the tide of infection, invariably falling victim to the malady they treat, have begun to form fanatical extermination squads whose policies are condoned by authority. A notion forms, twisting the tenets of the Hippocratic oath to say that when the oath taker is subject to the half-death of infection they are obliged to spend their lasting days attempting to destroy the source of the contagion. The paramilitary forces formed from the infected medical practicioners find themselves deigned to mete out persecution to the sufferers they were formally treating. Equipped with the leftovers of dissolved military forces, the Doctors' Militia are organised to burn all infected areas and sufferers; a campaign which stalks across blasted lands, mirroring the wave of infection in an addled attempt at backtracking all the way to some imaginary source.
Extensive bombing campaigns start firestorms that incinerate whole cities. Squads of "scorched earth" units are tasked with eradicating outlying locales. The distinctive appearance of the plague doctors, the only sight originally associated with any idea of hope, often causes the confused survivors of bombing runs to rush, open armed, towards the oncoming squads.

Thompson's art takes steampunk, cyberpunk, anime, WWI history, Renaissance-style textures, and a dose Gerald Scarfe's art from The Wall to add to deep and compelling worlds. Much of his art is contracted concept art used by game designers to fill out and visualize world's of their own.


 
                                        DAJJAL
Built by the Royal Family as a grandiose military deterrent, the Dajjal towered above the ground; sealed from any future interference, autonomous and powered indefinitely by its fusion power plants. Initially this building sized cipher was stationed immobile in the capital, funded, maintained, and hailed by a public relations firm bankrolled by an untraceable line that did not appear to lead back to the state. At a particularly high point of global unrest the Dajjal suddenly slinked into action; leveling the capital in which it resided. The nation's other strategic robots were quickly torn asunder by the Dajjal on its obtusely apparent objective of leaving the country, where it commenced on a campaign targeting national capitals one after the other. No emergency plans proved effective, and none of the extreme options ranging from nuclear arms to the prize strategic robots of the world's superpower could halt its progression. Rapid intelligence gathering discovered that anything relating to the production of the Dajjal were completely falsified down to the last detail. The Royal Family, now completely unnaccounted for, and possibly deceased in the destruction of the capital, are the only known link that may be able to shed light on this global terror that seemed to come into this world from nowhere and was now engaged in some terrifyingly unknowable campaign.

Produced for TRUEMAX Studios.

Thompson's understanding of form and figure along with his ability to bring pieces of worlds into visual space in a skillful and compelling manner allows him a special place as both a designer and artisan. The 'deeper meaning' (i.e. heavy metaphor and symbolism) may, at times, be lacking, but that isn't his intention in the firstplace (at least not from what I've seen). It seems to me that Thompson simply wishes to create a rich world with a well told mythos and strong visual presence and develop that world. A worthy pursuit.