John W Fesken is a painter, illustrator, scrawler, video artist, musician, installation artist, dioramist, poet, and all around Renaissance Madman.  He weaves fairy tails on window panes and in boxes using found objects and other ephemera, painting, burning, and scratching his stories from junk.  His pieces all tell a story, and his characters have histories and feelings of despair and hope.

I met John at the Artsplosure a few weeks back.  If you are a Triangle native, you are probably familiar with Artsplosure – an outdoor art market in Raleigh, mostly filled with run of the mill nature photography, paintings, and jewelry.  So naturally, I was drawn to the sore thumb of the event (I mean this in the most admiring / endearing way).  His booth was full of dark scenes of creepy characters in dingy settings and a table full of hilarious / gross / dirty magnets (I got one with Han Solo and caption “Self-described asshole”).

But his real passion are his characters – like the doctor, who employs morbid tactics to save his love, or the woman waiting for the pink moon.  Not content to let the characters live statically, he pseudo-animates and films their actions and struggles into shorts, giving them life beyond their wooden box settings.

Someone get this man a real website so he can get off Myspace.

Tags: art fair, Artist, creepy, diorama, fairy tale