E-mail: paul.lindgren@gmail.com
Phone / Text Message: 1-403-598-2684
Sales and Commissions:
If you'd like to buy anything you see on display here, or request the comission of a new custom piece, by all means, send me an e-mail.and ask me about it. My pricing is very modest, I don't depend on my art to pay the bills, infact, I prefer to use the barter system.
I presently (May 2008) have some art on display and available for sale at Widow Maker Comics, downtown, Red Deer.
My Messy Studio
This is where the magic happens
Artist Statement: (A work in progress, subject to change at my discretion)
Ever since I was a kid, I was big into the fantasy genre. It started with watching Saturday morning cartoons as a kid growing up in the 80's. Other kids would play sports and do music lessons, and I tried doing those things too, but my first real passion was the playing with toys and drawing pictures inspired by my favorite cartoon shows and movies.
My passion would later evolve to include video games, comic books and dungeons and dragons in my teenage years. Now as an adult, I enjoy much of all of the same things, with added nudity, violence, and all that other fun stuff that kids aren't allowed to see.
I've always been bored living in the real world, I guess that's why I don't spend much time there. I don't know how many times I got busted day-dreaming in elementary school and many of the best drawings I made in highschool are on the back side of the pages of the notes I took the odd times when I WAS paying attention in class. Even now when I'm at work, I spend most of my days reading fantasy novels, drawing in my sketchbook and daydreaming. I'll come home and I'll watch movies or play video games that take me far away from the drugery of this life. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good things in this world, but it's got boundaries
The Artistic Autobiography of Paul E. Lindgren
I always loved to draw as a kid. Some of my fondest early childhood memories are making Dino-Riders pictures with felt pens. In my teens, I started getting into comic books, video games and dungeons and dragons, all of which continue to be major influences in my art today. I used to like making my own comic books. The first ones were barely comprehensible sequential drawings on the back of reused photocopier paper that my parents brought home from work for me. I made this character Dino-man, who had the power to turn into any kind of dinosaur. Later in my teens I started shamelessly tracing from comic books and using pencil crayons to create some fairly impressive looking comics. They even had a little publisher’s logo and fake bar code drawn on them to give them that authentic look. During this time, Dino-man (who had been using his dinosaur transformation powers less and less) evolved into “N.A.R.F.” which must have stood for something, but damn if I can remember what it was. It was a silly word from Pinky and The Brain that I liked, so I used it as his name. Somewhere along the line, he got an arm-gun a la Megaman.
In Junior High, I was a total art nerd. Every morning before home room, I’d be drawing my character Punky Bally Man, who was this bad-ass Mohawk sporting mutant happy face guy. I was the creative genius of the art class, but once I got into high school and started running into all these kids who could draw better than me (well, okay, they were probably just better at shamelessly tracing from comics than me). I started to get really bent out of shape over it. I just couldn’t stay inspired. Art was my thing, and it seemed I was no longer good at it. The whole fantasy/comic book thing was shunned by most every art teacher I ever had – kindergarten to university. I didn’t have that much skill – or not enough skill that I had any degree of confidence in myself. After almost flunking grade 10 art class, I stopped taking it. I still loved to draw, but I found high school art class to be very restrictive.
So after graduating high school in 1999, I found myself working as a janitor at the mall. This is exactly the kind of shitty job I needed to motivate me to get SOME form of post-secondary education. A friend of mine was doing this “visual arts” thing at the local college. I’d known this guy since kindergarten and we grew up together drawing Dino-Riders pictures and making comics, so I figured if he can do this, I can too.
College tried to steer me away from the fantasy art, comics and cartoons that I loved so well, but it also opened my mind to working with some different materials that I might have overlooked otherwise. We actually had a dude who worked on the creature-creation for the Lord of The Rings movies come in as a visiting artist. This dude inspired me to take up sculpting. Of course, I still had to suffer through a few douche-bag professors and boring art history classes. The more I learned about the pompous world of high art, the less I liked it, but then there were always the few rebels who fucked with the system from the inside, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Dubuffet, and Andy Warhol to name a few. Though I can’t really say I cared too much for any of the work they produced.
Anyhow, once college was done, I found myself working at Wal-Mart, no more artistically talented or enlightened than before, so after another year working another shitty job, I got it into my head that I wanted to go back to school to get a full on Fine Arts degree, combined with some education and maybe get a proper job as an art teacher – one of the few careers available to an artist that would come with a steady pay check. I applied to the
I received kind of a rude awakening upon my arrival at the UofL. While I was meeting with some of the professors in the Art Faculty, it was discovered that for all that I’d learned during my time at RDC, I really didn’t have any impressive artwork to show for it. My time at RDC was more spent completing assignments than making art. One prof actually came right out and said that he didn’t think I was ready for a 3rd studio class. His name is Nick Wade and he’s a douche bag. I ended up working with a fellow named Glen MacKinnon, who was much more laid back and seemed to have at least a little more faith in my abilities than Nick “The Douche Bag” Wade. I totally bloomed under Glen’s tutelage. I started by making a variety of weird, random objects, including an aluminum tree-shape with leaves and batteries growing on it like fruit and a mirror with the image of Mr. Clean scratched into it, and eventually I made some of my first action figure portraits . I had an awesome year of art and my good grades got me accepted into the education program.
The education thing didn’t work out for me, but I really think it’s for the best. Teaching in this day and age involves too much political correctness, organization, and responsibility for my liking. I flunked out of my practicum, but I still got full credit for all the classes I’d taken and my semester ended a month early. I spent that month smoking pot and sculpting in my messy basement studio, somewhat shamed for flunking out of education, but content in the knowledge that that career path just wasn’t right for me. Probably the nicest thing about my semester of education was that because I wasn’t in any art classes, any art that I made wouldn’t be subject to critiques or grading of any kind. I was free to make whatever I wanted so I started by making a naked chick riding a stegosaurus .
In December 2005, I completed my degree and moved back home to my parents’ basement. I found a blue collar job with a 4-days-on-4-days-off schedule that would (theoretically) allow me enough free time to make my art. Unfortunately, I didn’t really have much of a studio space in my cramped parents’ basement, plus living with your parents really kills a lot of artistic inspiration, and I didn’t produce much work that year.
As I’m writing this at the beginning of 2008, I’m working out of a "home studio" (my bed room) in my home city Red Deer, Alberta. I currently have some of my sculptures on display and available for sale at Widow Maker Comics downtown.
