Still life, abstracts and ultra-violence from the brilliant Sam D'Orazio

Illustrator Sam D’Orazio is to gouache what Robert Crumb is to pen and ink; a surreal, perverse creator of strange landscapes populated by grotesque versions of ourselves, all swollen-bodied and mentally unhinged. His characters represent some of the darkest and most confusing aspects of our day-to-day lives, haphazardly coming to terms with the situations they find themselves in; sometimes with unpredictably violent results.

But that’s not all Sam’s capable of producing, he’s also got a classical streak running through his work. He’s honed his compositional skill producing a multitude of traditional still lifes and advocates the use of abstraction within commercial illustration – a rare breed in today’s largely figurative landscape. We love Sam’s work, both for its surreal insightfulness and the way he sums up his practice: “Each thing I make is like some kind of shitty curry, and I’ve made it with all of these spices thrown in, and sometimes the cap falls off on one of the shakers.”