When I was a child, I wanted to be an artist.  I also wanted to be a mad scientist.  As it turned out, learning how to draw was a lot easier than getting backyard insects to grow into giant, radioactive monsters.  I still feel guilty for the horrible things I did to bugs in the name of demented science when I was five. 

Fueled by the artwork in Warren Publications such as Creepy and Eerie, Frank Frazetta and James Bama book covers, the first Roger Dean art book, Ray Harryhausen films, and my fascination with animals (dinosaurs!), I drew weird, dark worlds and critters of my own. 

After high school, I was accepted into a “Commercial Graphics” program at Southern Illinois University, where I learned to create imagery for technical publications and instruction manuals.  As exciting as that was, I did NOT finish that program.  However, the style of drawing that I learned there informed and haunted my artwork for decades after.  

Through a series of circumstances and bad decisions that can only be made by the young and foolhardy, I allowed art to take a back seat, while a career in the military, security, and law enforcement took me in a completely different direction for most of my adult life.  It wasn’t until I turned 40 that I realized that I was unhappy and needed to get back to the thing that had fueled 

my fire as a boy:  the arts.  I went back to school in Las Vegas, working toward a degree in Motion Graphics and Visual Effects.  I worked in small film productions providing FX work here and there and eventually moved to Washington state, land of rain, clouds, trees, and Bigfoot.  

In 2019, encouraged by the Dark Art Society, I decided to go back to the very beginning and focus on visual arts.  I started to teach myself how to paint and began to draw again.  I eventually broke free from the stiff drawing style of my early training and started producing works in acrylics, pen and ink, colored pencil, and soft pastels.  Every day is an opportunity to learn a new technique, a new way of approaching a problem.  I hope I never stop trying new things.  I hope I never stop being a student.  

My motto is “Dark art for a wide eyed world.”  I try to maintain the mindset that we all have as children:  a wide eyed curiosity in an amazing world of magic, fantasy and monsters, sparkling and full of wonders…along with the certainty that there really are things that live under the bed and go bump in the night.  And this, more than anything else, this return to the magic and terror of childhood, has made all the difference in the world.

Today I am a para-educator for children with special needs during the day and make cool, weird things and creatures in my studio (my…laboratory?) at night.  I am a co-organizer of a horror film festival / performance and artist vending event and have served on my city’s Art Commission, facilitating public art works and programs.  

The bugs here at the studio are safe...but am I?  Sometimes in the wee hours, I hear them flying into and crawling on the studio window.  I am certain that they are the descendents of those I wronged in the dim past.  

In time, I learned that they are far more interesting and exciting as they are, without the benefits of a magic growth serum.  

Still…it WOULD be cool.  

Langley J. West