Steven Warrick’s Banyard Aquarium

Steven Warrick lives in Richmond, Virginia, and he is a truly creative and fantastic artist.  He does design, original drawings, comics, and more, and we were lucky enough to get our hands on a series of interesting pieces to show you, and to talk to him about what in the wide world made him think of putting fish heads on barnyard animals.  He’s a buddy of mine, so I just asked him.  He flung a radish at the wall, turned to me and said:

The whole putting fish heads on farm animals thing was kind of spur of the moment because I needed an idea right then. I was trying to come up with a way to use a routing machine at work to carve out woodblock prints, and I needed to think of a fast illustration to create a cut file with. Something ridiculous and nonsensical like a rooster with a fish head. I’d call it a fooster or a fock, depending on how you wanna pronounce it. I prefer to scream “FOCK!” at people when they ask what it is.

So I asked him did the idea work out for his work project, and he responded:

In any case the experiment didn’t work out because the line drawing I had created digitally was too complex for the machine to handle. So, not wanting to let a perfectly good, if odd, illustration go to waste, I brought the line drawing into Photoshop and painted it in.

So then I asked him what made him continue, once the Fooster didn’t hold up to block-cutting expectations.

The series naturally evolved from there. I tried matching up the type of fish with the type of animal they were going to be crossed with. For example the “feep” is a cross between a sheep and a California sheephead drum. The prints are made to resemble folk art. They’re simplistic, and a little abstracted. The reactions I’ve gotten from them have been that people seem to find them aesthetically pleasing but somewhat unerving. Kind of like something you’d find in the farmhouse of Dr. Moreau.

So, without further ado, here are the animals in Steven’s barnyard aquarium.  May they please (and slightly unsettle) you as well.

The “Fooster,” or the “FOCK!”

The “Feep.”

The “Foat.”

The “Fovine”

And finally, the “Fwine.”

For more examples of Steven’s work, check out his online portfolio.