Our Artist: Chris Hawtin

I first met Chris at my daughters’ school. His impression of a tramp stealing a child to blag a square meal was too perfect to be plausible. In the first year of playing board games together I never knew that he was high brow, or an accomplished fine artist. He always referred to what he did as “painting spaceships over bleak landscapes”, which is essentially true, but also a reductionist travesty typical of the worst self-marketer I know.

The scale of Chris’s work is incredible (check out www.chrishawtin.com). Many of his paintings are over 4m across. He is so prolific that when he runs out of canvasses he merely paints right over the top of earlier paintings with total disregard for any time lost. He stacks work in heaps and forgets about them.

I rescued the charcoal drawing (pictured above) from under a collection of his unwashed coffee cups.  When Chris moved to Athens I missed him a lot. We kept in touch, but I never even considered him to do the artwork for KO-CHA! Other than being an obsessive online gamer, digital stuff had never seemed his bag to me. What I didn’t know was Greece had changed that. Whether outsized canvases were more expensive there, or having a save function had at last become appealing, Chris had quietly trained himself on digital painting tools with a view to designing characters for computer games.

You can probably imagine my reaction when he dropped this into a conversation right when I was silently mulling how the f@!k I was going to find an artist for that very thing.  Naturally, I bludgeoned him over the head with a press gang baton and locked him in a dungeon. Like rumplestiltskin’s slave girl he languishes there to this day, filling my inbox with heart grenades and gloating characters, eternally grateful that digital files don’t get spoiled by coffee cup rings.