About Kevin Eslinger
I have spent my career moving between fine art and the industries that manufacture popular culture—painting, sculpting, designing toys, building replicas, working with three-dimensional scans, and returning again and again to the question of what an image means after it has entered the culture.
I grew up in the 1980s, when entertainment, advertising, toys, and childhood imagination often seemed to belong to the same world. Those images stayed with me. They eventually led me to ArtCenter College of Design in Southern California and then into the toy and collectible industry.
From Objects to Images
My professional career began at Gentle Giant Studios, where I painted prototypes and worked around the emerging use of three-dimensional scanning in entertainment. I later became a toy designer at McFarlane Toys, contributing to projects connected with The Matrix, Terminator 3, and NASCAR. At Master Replicas, I worked as a creative director on licensed prop replicas and collectibles.
That work taught me how familiar characters and objects are constructed—not only physically, but culturally. A successful image can be reduced to a few essential shapes and still remain instantly recognizable. It can feel personal to millions of people who have never met one another.
Becoming an Independent Artist
In 2007, I left corporate employment and began supporting myself through independent creative work. My Splatter series grew from an experiment: how much of an image could I remove while preserving its identity? Loose marks, negative space, and fragments of color became enough to make a figure appear in the viewer’s mind.
Over time, my attention moved from recognizable characters toward the systems that shape identity itself. The Dystopian Selfies and later glitch paintings examine people living through screens, digital distortion, artificial personas, and the roles technology asks us to perform. These works are less about predicting the future than recognizing how much of that future has already arrived.
The Work Now
I remain interested in transformation: the point where a physical object becomes an image, an image becomes a commodity, and a commodity becomes part of someone’s memory. My work moves between humor and unease, nostalgia and disruption, handmade marks and digitally altered realities.
This store brings together signed prints from different periods of that journey. It is both a working gallery and an archive of an artist who has spent decades inside—and sometimes outside—the machinery of popular culture.
I live and work in Westminster, Colorado.