This month is all about the artist Kre8 (pronounced create). Kre8’s real name is Kevin Virgil, and he was born in Germany – which is actually the same country Peter Max comes from, who you might remember from a few months previously. He was always doodling and drawing as a young kid and when he was a teen he was approached by some graffiti artists and invited to try that. This is where he became known as Kre8 and spent a decade traveling the United States, creating graffiti displays.
Kre8 created this name to stand for “Knowledge Reveals Evolution” while the 8 is the infinity symbol, vertically. Kre8 has experimented with many artistic styles and he calls his current style Kre8izm, combining aspects of abstract art and Surrealism. He draws inspiration from Dali, Andy Warhol, and Pablo Picasso. Before joining the fine art world he also spent time as a tattoo artist.
Now let’s take a look at some of his artwork.
This piece is called Changing Winds. You can see a bit of the Surrealism with his elephant and the abstract in all of his paint splashes. He frequently uses a sold color backing to really bring out the foreground prominently. In general his background is normally some shade of grey but he has begun to play with other colors like the blue-ish shade you see here.
This next piece is called Don’t Mind Me, I’m Here To Kre8. In this image you can see a nod to his past as a graffiti artist as in the painting there is a man, graffitiing the side of a building.
This is a piece he created just last year in 2022 called Food For Thought 2.0 In it you can really see how he is influenced by abstract art and you can also see a bit of his history with graffiti in here.
Now you must be wondering, how exactly does Kre8 relate to the theme of frozen treats this month. Well I’m getting there with perhaps my favorite piece from him, Rainbows and Butterflies or as my dad calls it “Chasing the Ice Cream Man Like They Are the Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow”. Personally, with as hard as it is to find ice cream trucks here, I like my dad’s title a lot better. With all the people sitting on top of the ice cream truck it seems like they all had to chase the ice cream truck down. You can see Kre8’s abstract leanings at work with the fact that all of his people, besides the astronaut are faceless (and headless for that matter) and you can see the Surrealism in the dripping rainbow, sort of like the rainbow is ice cream melting on a hot summer day.
Well that is it for this month. What do you think about the art of Kre8?
See you all next month when we tackle a new artist.