Christian-Attridge

Writer,dummy pornstar,illustrator

Son, never trust a man who doesn’t drink because he’s probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They’re the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They’re usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they’re a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can’t trust a man who’s afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It’s damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he’s heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.

Current Residence: A place I dont want to be in.
I sit by the roadside
The driver changes the wheel.
I do not like the place I have come from.
I do not like the place I am going to.
Why with impatience do I
Watch him changing the wheel?

Favourite genre of music: Sad songs
Favourite style of art: Naif
Favourite cartoon character: Sid the sexist,Two Fat Slags, Condorito.
Personal Quote: Eat healthy, stay fit, still die.

BIOGRAPHY
Introduction By Noah Berlatsky

I would like to think that somewhere between full-blown, howling death and a basket of newborn kittens exists a climate where the malice and the mirth can mingle. A couple of daisies on your grave, a little venom in your cocoa, some broken glass in your bouncy castle. This type of polar mixer can serve as an intriguing, endlessly entertaining, true-to-life foundation from which a smidgen of lore can grow. Exaggerate the extremes even a little, and the stories, characters, and places that emerge warp accordingly. It is the recognition and exploitation of this tension that immediately drew me to the work of chilean artist Christian Leiva-Attridge.

At first glance, Leiva's images seem to be rooted in an alternate world -- a world where gnomes travel via saddled dachshund-back and birds of all nations hatch adorned with the heads and hairstyles of every human stereotype imaginable. The bold, precise outlines give his ideas an immediate impact, but it's the aftertaste that really cuts deep. Everything comes with a story. I have never known Christian to create something without a reason for it to exist and an accompanying tale. His pictures are built from the simplest ingredients, ingredients with which the everyman can identify. Leiva documents his every day, every trip, every friend, and every experience within his art to the point where one could line up his life's work, decode the riddles, and have a clear idea of where he's been, how he felt about it, the types of folk he chopped it up with, and what lies ahead.

What does lie ahead? Inevitably, more days and nights locked in his oddball studio, as the "King of Nada" maintains an awesome and inspiring work ethic. Leiva-Attridge is, for all intents and purposes, the real deal. To say he works hard would be an understatement worthy of a bid in the Bog of Eternal Stench. While the public gets to soak in the varied fruits of his labor, he is laboring behind the scenes... intensely and always. The guy is an art machine fueled by wine, beer, and the occasional line of coke the size and shape of his country. On any given day, one can wander into Leiva's studio to find an entire new body of work that did not exist one week prior, complete with a storyline as engaging as the images themselves. The output level is shocking in both quality and quantity.

But, in the end, it's all only as deep as the man behind the drafting table. In an age with fewer and fewer creative heroes worth looking up to, I can say without hesitation that, in this case, the man at the helm of the hand doing the damage is a shepherd worth following. Leiva would probably cringe at a comment like that, as his hermitic and occasionally bashful composure doesn't sponge up compliments well. But, I'm writing this, so fuck him. I've been around the world and met a lot of "artists" who eat, shit, and breathe inside a bubble of self-aggrandizement, armies of yes-men at their sides ready to toot the bugles for every flimsy "breakthrough" they put forth. Leiva-Attridge avoids that typecasting by boiling his intentions down to their most elemental forms: he makes pictures, he makes a lot of them, he makes them for himself, he makes them for the people, and he makes them from the heart. I am proud to say that I look up to him. You should too.

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From the introduction to 'The Mindfuck Chambers, a study on enthopy and falling down'(latinamerican edition) by Levi Roos Meyer

"Christian Leiva-Attridge is one of a very few artists working in cartoon strips — honestly, a very few ever to have worked in cartooning— to have developed a completely unique visual style. We can look at anything Attridge draws and know it’s him by the precision of his meticulous, even lines, the muted but expressive color palette, the simplification of forms that manages to seem both naturalistic and artificial. Any single Leiva drawing codes for an entire way of making cartoons, a language the artist has created for himself from the raw material of panels and balloons."