photo by kheng juI'm a painter. This site is my canvas.
I paint with words, music, and pictures.
I hope you always find something here to illuminate your own journey. Visit often!
And embrace the unknown...
Sincerely,
Blake Chen
aka THE HUNGRY GHOST
WHAT I DO...
I'm a storyteller who loves to play with different ways of telling a story. I play with words, sounds, images - whatever medium that's appropriate and fun. I would describe my music style as Dylanesque trip hop. If Portishead, David Lynch, and His Bobness ever got together and made an album, this is what I imagine it would sound like. The comics I'm working on are in the vein of DC's Vertigo line - dark, suspenseful metaphysical fantasy.
MUSIC AND COMICS...
Ultimately, they are separate entities, and can be enjoyed separately. However, The Hungry Ghost album does make a cool soundtrack to the Twilight Lady comic, and the comic, in turn, expands and explores the mood and lyrical themes inherent in the music. I believe it does make the overall experience richer. For instance, a recurring emotional thread in my songs is the yearning to explore, the pleasure of satisfying one's curiosity, which is an essential theme in Twilight Lady. The Rona Eden character embodies that. She's an explorer who's willing to go to some pretty dark places to satisfy her curiosities.
HOW I GOT HERE...
I love to dabble, therefore I always hated school growing up. I'd zone out in class, I'd be drawing faces of masked men on a textbook during a science lecture. Looking back, I should never have gone to school in the first place. As you'd expect, I spent my college years skipping lectures! My focus was totally elsewhere. I dabbled in theater, poetry, film... Ultimately, I came to realize that a true artist cannot really be defined. People like to categorize - oh, he's a musician, she's a dancer, etc. But art is essentially about communication, and you communicate with all the tools at your disposal. One of the first pieces I ever completed was a play called "A Tale of Two Spirits", about two souls who are to be born into the world, when one of them finds out her would-be earth mother has had an abortion. To this day, it's still a work I'm very proud of.
MY SONGWRITING PROCESS...
Again, it's all about using the tools I have to communicate an idea, a feeling, a mood. The tools are, at this point in time, my trusty acoustic guitar, pen and paper, keyboards, and a collection of loops and samples. Sometimes it begins with a riff I've been carrying around in my head, or it could be a phrase or sentence jotted down after waking from a dream. Or through fiddling around I might come up with a sonic landscape, then go from there. Walk On Fire was such a piece. I had the music all done, basically, and the words that I added later were inspired by the music's mood. Heaven is a Dark Place was the other way around. All I had to start with was the title, scribbled on a piece of paper. It sounded like a revelation of some sort. I thought, hmm, so there's this guy who's seen heaven, and it was nothing like he imagined. And of course, one person's perception of heaven could seem like hell to another. So from that premise I began to write, and had almost all the lyrics done before I tackled the music.
3D ART...
3D comics are still a relatively new thing, so it's a medium that's constantly being re-defined as new techniques are discovered and new styles are pioneered. I have to say, I love that. There's so much that's unknown, so many paths waiting to be paved. From what I've seen, a lot of 3D artists out there tend to borrow visually from superhero comics. I see a lot of Kirby-influenced stuff, for example. My intention is to bring a more cinematic approach to 3D storytelling.
MY INFLUENCES...
Hitchcock's "The Birds" is my all-time favorite scary movie. Comics don't get any more magical than the first 14 issues of Alan Moore's "Swamp Thing" run. Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" and The Songs of Leonard Cohen are my desert island albums. I've recently discovered Neil Gaiman's Sandman books. He has such a terrific imagination. Talk about creating a world! What a fantastic set of characters... Dream, Desire, Death... wow.
Well, enough about me. Let us know how you came to be here. Feel free to e-mail me. Rest assured, I read everything and do my best to reply to everyone.