Chris Cote is a Canadian artist currently enrolled in the Fine Arts program at Durham College. Primarily an oil painter, though he is also known to occasionally create horror comics.

​

Attracted to oil paints after years of working in acrylics due to the increased flexibility of the medium, Chris’s works often depict surreal, dreamlike, and often macabre depictions of atmospheric fantasy. Since enrolling in formal arts education, an increased exposure to new artistic approaches has led to a great deal of experimentation and growth, leading to a more refined artistic direction over the past few years.

​

Inspired by the great surrealist and fantasy painters both classical and modern, from Bosch and Goya to Giger and Beksinski, the goal of the work is not to illustrate specific concepts or narratives, but to create rich visual experiences that can lead the viewer down their own path of interpretation without guidance.

 

The defining aspect of the creation of these paintings is the marriage of blind expression with technical obsession. A painting will often undergo several total transformations from the beginning stages to the end, with each element added based largely on intuition and raw aesthetic expression, only to be later tuned and shaped into detailed and convincing forms, if even kept at all. The end result of this process is a work that owes as much to its final vision to the many layers subtly hidden beneath the surface, to the meticulous refinement that glues together the whole of the piece.

 

The goal of these works is not to depict any particular vision or send any message, but to create art in its most isolated form, removed from logic and meaning, so that the viewer may find in the piece the things that mean most to them.