Vendor Spotlight: KPOLLY

Kristopher Pollard came into my life through the front door of my house.  He was tasked by Milwaukee Film to illustrate their marketing campaign by drawing 5 year olds impersonating famous movie scenes.  The scene chosen for my five year old?  Jack Nicholson peering creepily through a hatcheted hole in a door of the blockbuster horror thriller The Shining. 

All morning my son and I had been watching trailers with scenes of "ketchup' flowing through hotel corridors and watching Jack growl and sneer through the hole in the door.  A little fact I knew, but Kristopher did not, was that my son is also ridiculously shy to newcomers and I knew getting him to do it again so some stranger could take a picture of him might be a challenge.  And then in walks Kristopher.

Kristopher is much bigger than a five year old.  And my five year old immediately began to get a little nervous, which I could see when his expression turned immediately blank and he started looking at the floor.  I told my son that it was time to show this guy how he could snarl like the guy in the movie and Kristopher immediately started to giggle.  He was giddy.  My son lit up.  And I watched them from across the room as Kristopher held a camera to my son's face and captured his perfectly crooked snarl that was about to be drawn into a poster that my mother and my husband, both huge horror fans, would cherish every day since.  I knew he was a dude who I would be working with much more.  

Since this initial meeting, I have had a few more chances to continue working with Kristopher (definitely not enough).  He is one of the many people I know in Milwaukee who is so boundlessly talented, I am consistently blown away by his work. His latest monumental undertaking being a self published book entitled Fake A$$ Rappers, where he illustrates imagined rappers and then writes little stories or quotes about them on the facing page.  If you haven't seen this book Fake A$$ Rappers, please seek it out immediately (they will be at Hover Craft on Sunday, December 7th).

Kristopher specializes in strangely charming illustrative portraiture that relies on lines more than anything.  These lines are somehow perfectly wonky, carving out depth on a plain white sheet of paper as easily as his flattened patterns on the same work.  Patterns and depth, created through these lines orchestrate a composition that is always striking, always worth the viewer's time to sit back and explore the piece in-depth.  When I bugged him for a few quotes so I could feature him on the Hover Craft blog he wrote to me, "I love illustration and take a lot of inspiration from literature and film.  Storytelling, in general.  Stuff with a sense of humor or a sense of absurdity really appeals to me.  In general though, if something strikes me as funny, I want to draw it."

Don't forget to stop and give Kristopher.. I mean KPOLLY a high five on Sunday.  Tell him a joke!  See where it goes!