PAUL KOMODA

PAUL KOMODA, richly inspired since early childhood by his viscerally disturbing dreams, has been devoting his life to fleshing out the writhing substance of his visions through graphic and sculptural manifestation. He attended New York's School of Visual Arts, where he took courses on illustration and sequential art, but he found greater interest in sculpting — an art in which he is completely self-taught. During this period he worked for a time drawing diagrams of nuclear power generators for McGraw Hill. He ultimately departed that illustrious position to pursue and explore more creative avenues of expression. Apprenticing with surrealist jeweler Axel, he learned to fabricate his own style of fashionable menace, in the twisted form of rings and pendants imbued with his idiosynchratic flare.

Paul went on to do character fabrication work for several of director/animator Voltaire's stop-motion animation projects, including, some years later, the original Chi-Chian station I.D. for the SCI FI Channel. Looking to improve his technical skills, he entered the field of resin model kit sculpture, where his work was highly regarded for its unsettling, detailed intensity as well as the artist's ability to capture human likenesses. This led to an assignment with DC Comics, for whom he sculpted maquettes of the characters featured in the latest Batman film.

He is currently working as lead sculptor at the Brooklyn-based studio Art Asylum, where a new generation of cutting-edge, unrepentantly malicious toys are being brought into an unsuspecting world. Paul continues to work on his original art, and he contributes his images of brutal aesthetics to the bands Android Lust and I, Parasite. His work can also be seen featured on the covers of Cthulusex Magazine. Samples of Paul Komoda's illustrated work may be found at www.geocities.com/agonyagogo and www.darkvisionmedia.org. The drawings have been described as "fluidly disturbing" ... "a plentitude of carapacial segmentation as well as the occasional downward spiral."