Thru Shadows Alternative Dark Culture & Art: Camille Rose Garcia: Weird Beauty with Social Criticism

The Lowbrow American artist Camille Rose Garcia is responsible for some of the most creative and intriguing alternative dark art out there. She has recently released an Alice In Wonderland book with her illustrations, which give a fresh acidic twist to the classic tale.

Though she graduated from Art school, for the first few years Camille Rose Garcia didn’t want anything to do with art, preferring to join a punk rock band. But then after seeing works by the Clayton Brothers and Mark Rydens, she decided to start all over, as theirs styles were similar.

She and other alternative artists from Los Angeles define the Lowbrow style, which is an art movement that started in the late 1970’s, which have a lot of influence of comics visuals, street culture, punk rock, and other subcultures.

Describing her way of doing art, Camille Rose Garcia said: “I think I have always approached art making in the same way as a lot of my favorite bands.

“Bands like The Clash and the Dead Kennedy's make this really rad music that in some cases sounds really fun, but still has a social commentary…

“I always wanted to do art that people could relate to but also carry some social relevance. Like in art school it wasn't really about commentary, or if it was, it was really boring, so I really just wanted to create art that was not only super fun to look at, and if you’re 5 or 15 and hated art your still could like, and relate to it and understand and would still carry that whole social political commentary, which is kinda the same approach that a lot of my favorite bands were taking.” [1]

Camille Rose Garcia really has some strong points of view about present society. Commenting on global warming, the break of economy and other current problems, she had some provocative thoughts to share:

“To me it just seems that things are getting worse and worse faster and faster. As far as the whole machine of keeping people scared, they don’t rebel if they are scared, it’s just part of the control mechanism.

“Then there is all the stuff that is real. I don’t really think all the terror warnings are real, but the global warming is real, the huge deficit is real, the end of oil is real, all those things are real. But the terror alerts, I don't know how much of that is real and it’s an easy way for our leaders to blame them.

“I just think, on a very basic personal, spiritual level if every person would take some responsibility, ya know, as far as being cool with others and not being an asshole. That’s the only real revolution that I think is possible at this point.”

Besides having worked as a free lancer illustrator for magazines, she has published three books: The Saddest Place on Earth, (Last Gasp, 2006), The Magic Bottle: A BLAB! Storybook, (Fantagraphics, 2006) and Tragic Kingdom (Last Gasp, 2007). She also has works in permanent collections of LACMA and the San Jose Museum of Art.

Below are three of her artworks. Visit her site for more.