Take a talented painter and feed him a steady diet of heavy metal, cartoons, and comics and if you’re lucky you might get something like Steve Seeley. His grip on pop culture is so firm that it might be considered a stranglehold, if it were not so loving. The fondness that Seeley has for the comic heroes and Japanese monsters and b-list celebrities that grace his canvases is palpable. With this fondness comes an intimacy and understanding. Seeley knows that Superman’s double life is not that different than the Olsen twins’ own identity crisis. He shows us there is something equally strange about Kim Kardashian as there is about the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Seeley grew up in central Wisconsin and it comes as no surprise that he spent much of is childhood creating comic books that never ended up making sense. After receiving his BA in printmaking from the University of Stevens Point-Wisconsin, Seeley moved to Columbus, Ohio, where he received his MFA from the Ohio State University. It was there he developed his fondness for acrylics and his strange taste in canvases, often using old scraps of wallpaper and comics for his backgrounds. Seeley now lives in Chicago and his art has been exhibited all over the United States.

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