The Dance of Death

Pete Fowler (born 1969 in Cardiff) is a Welsh artist best known for his artwork for the Welsh band Super Furry Animals. He is a freelance illustrator and "monster creator" inspired by Japanese art, folklore, myths, psychedelia and super nature. He has also done a number of other projects in the UK and Japan, such as television advertisements (Kia Picanto), as well as having art exhibitions all over the world. Fowler works in a variety of media, including drawing, painting, animation, and sculpture. Fowler's art is done in a postmodern cartoon style. His work revolves around a central narrative and features a recurring set of characters. The "monsters" Fowler creates all reside on "Monsterism Island". Fowler invents extensive back-stories for his characters; each has its own specific traits and levels of "monsterism". Fowler is most known for his designer toys of his characters, which he himself manufactures with his own company. A CD called The Sounds of Monsterism Island was released in 2005 by Heavenly Records. According to the press release, "The record is a compilation album that works as a soundtrack to the world of Monsterism...The album features psychedelic music from the '60s through to today, much of it unearthed and Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is a neologism for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray". It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints.