The Illustrated: March 5th at Illiterate

Illiterate Presents "The Illustrated" collaborative and individual illustrations and animations by John Grigsby and Kristopher Hutson. The show runs from March 05 - March 26. The Opening Reception is on March 5 at 6PM at Illiterate.

About The Artists

Childhood friends and creative collaborators, John Grigsby and Kristophor Hutson met at the age of twelve. Both captivated by stop motion animations using clay models, drawing became the necessary language by which they exchanged visual ideas. As their individual abilities with illustrating increased so did their abilities to realize more and more complex animations. The two continued to develop their mutual interest in moving images along parallel lines, going so far as to follow one another form city to city to work in tandem as they each built their own unique esthetic style. The latest stop on their journey: Denver, Colorado.



John Grigsby

Animator and musician, John Grigsby employs traditional and experimental techniques in his explorations of motion through visual and sonic art.

As an animator, John Grigsby utilizes claymation, drawn animations and objects captured in stop motion to create his painstaking films. In his etch-a-sketch narrative, "An Introduction to Lucid Dream Exploration" Grigsby delved into the dark internal world of his own psyche using the iconic red children's drawing tool to produce each laborious frame. In his most recent project, Grigsby manipulated clay figures as well as organic materials, such as fire and ash, to bring to life a philosophical tale of human suffering in Plato's Allegory of the Cave. He is currently working on a new stop-motion project based on an Aesop's Fable.

No less musician than animator, Grigsby often composes and plays the soundtracks to his films. A trained drummer, guitarist and pianist, now primarily focuses his acoustic attention towards playing bass in various experimental jazz groups, including Hamster Theater, Greg Harris Vibe Quintet, Static Trio and Entr'act, which will be performing live at "The Illustrated" opening reception. John's knowledge of music and visual arts has led to recent experimentation with various color and sound frequencies based on brain waves to stimulate certain brain functions.


Kristophor Hutson

Fascinated by personalities both imagined and real, one finds in illustrator and graphic designer, Kris Hutson, the anthropomorphizing caricaturist. An avid comedic voice actor and impersonator, Hutson is a student of stretching reality and playing on expectations for the sake of bringing to life a successful illusion. In his artwork this can be seen in his use and distortion of expected physical geometries. Exemplified in Hutson's "Postura Obscura" series, this suspended disbelief can be found in the faces and figures that explode into gestured abstraction and snap back again to form a cohesive loop of astonishment and recognition. Utilizing fine art techniques such as charcoal and watercolor, as well as digital manipulation, Hutson's vivid exaggerations resound with a depth of light and emotion that makes them seem to call out from beyond the page asking to be animated, as if his characters were all sitting in a casting room waiting for their chance to star in the big show.