Chris Millar’s RBC prize featured on Brave Worlds & Bloody Knuckles

Life in Black

Calgary Artist Wins Award By Portraying Norwegian Black Metal And Alternative Dentistry!
Posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007 at 09:20:14 EST

Calgary artist Chris Millar has seen his star rise as of late, culminating in waiting lists for his next set of paintings, and any for the foreseeable future (at the current rate, he estimates he’s only good for four a year).

His ascendance has been confirmed as late through an excruciatingly complex and detailed work called FACEBITOR, which took the artist, an avowed metal and punk connoisseur, four and a half months of ten to 12 hour days straight painting. FACEBITOR recently took one of two runner-up prizes in the prestigious RBC Canadian Painting Competition, for which Millar received $15,000, and untold publicity throughout the finalists’ exhibition tour across Canada tour.

A brief artist bio within the 2007 program reads in part, “Starting from an absurdly Pynchon-esque narrative, FACEBITOR portrays a tale of Norwegian black metal, small-town Alberta, supernatural forces and alternative dentistry.

According to Millar, the painting indeed reflects a detailed narrative, in which the various corpse-painted figures play authentic plot-heavy parts. BW&BK Editor-In Chief Martin Popoff can even be spotted in the lower left-hand corner cooking up some sort of metal list.

Millar’s next move may involve a series of paintings that would show up as booklets or booklet pages within a mysterious record that may just pop up in cool used record stores (it’s complicated).

Chris – who is currently represented in Calgary and Chicago – can be reached at chriswm@telus.net.