Arthur Prothero is a non-binary, full-time freelance illustrator currently residing in Seattle, Washington. They graduated from Broadview Entertainment Arts University in 2016 with a BFA in Comic and Sequential Art. Their works are heavily inspired by death, the brutality and beauty of nature, the occult, folklore, and identity. Most of my artwork is created utilizing traditional media such as ink, colored pencil, and alcohol markers, along with some digital works on the side. Some favorite subjects to draw specifically are werewolves, animals, demons, and viscera.
To date, Arthur has traveled to many different states in the US showing and selling both their personal work and commission services at various art fairs and public conventions. Over the past 8 years, they have been focusing on improving their craft and building a system of peers, clients, and supporters that have helped them continue to do what they love most in this life. Arthur has had original pieces displayed at the Urban Arts Gallery in Salt Lake City, and has become a member of their boutique that both sells their work and supports the gallery. Outside of that, Arthur works full-time doing illustrative commission work for clients of all backgrounds through mostly social media, along with selling their own designs on shirts, as well as prints, stickers, and patches through Etsy.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Fighting tooth and nail against the suffocating shroud of depression has cultivated within me a deep, repeating connection to death. It is this relationship with death that has guided my work to the primal divinity of Nature and its innate cycles of death and rebirth. Observing and depicting its processes and wild magic has always been a touchstone for me in a lifetime of struggles with a manufactured style of living in a society that often feels meaningless and empty. I can't find fear for the dark parts of the natural world when I look into the blackest forests or darkest oceans, only reverence and love. The transformative power of death is beautiful. The way fungi grow on the old dead bones, flesh, and roots of Nature and transform it into something new, something different, is beautiful. The thought that nothing, form nor identity, is permanent is reassuring.
Difficult and painful transformations within myself have long drawn me to external representations of beasts that stalk the forests of the mind; particularly werewolves. They are outsiders looking in, fierce and feared, but free, self-actualized. The ways I've had to change myself and fight to live as a transgender individual have scarred me, but what I've become is meaningful. The process of becoming & unbecoming is painful, but equally beautiful and inspiring, and I've felt drawn to depicting it my entire life. Life is violent, but it continues. I process this as best I can through my artwork.