Cone The Weird
Born in Munich, Cone The Weird started doing graffiti back in 1993. He has been fascinated with various types of character design since his early childhood. Over the years, these characters have become ever more important, up to point where Cone almost exclusively uses character design in his recent works. Since 2006, he mostly draws black-and-white pictures with a focus on ink drawings. The underlying idea of this was to reduce effects in favour of being able to elaborate on the character design and content of the drawing. In 2004, Cone The Weird moved to Saarbrücken, Germany, to study communication design. He graduated with distinction and received a scholarship of the University of the Saarland. Following his graduation, he was offered the opportunity of working as a lecturer for illustration at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar (HBKSaar). Before moving to Saabrücken, Cone The Weird worked as a storyboard and concept artist at a film and television production company in Munich. He was heavily influenced by his early access to large book collections consisting of illustrated books, comics and specialist literature with lots of illustrations. Since his early childhood, he has been fascinated with the pictorial worlds hidden in these books, their contradictions and their inherent mythologies. From woodcuts of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance paintings to Surrealism and pop art, Victorian advertising prints as well as the design elements used in record covers—all of these different styles left their indelible mark on his creative development. Both in terms of their composition as well as their content, his unfailingly detailed drawings are structured in various levels of meaning, with all of these levels merging into one another to achieve perfect harmony. His self-portraits form a series of drawings that has become increasingly important for him over the last few years. More and more often, these drawings feature the figure of a bearded man with glasses—but he doesn't always appear in the same form, with his physical shape being varied in the most diverse manner. This approach is rooted in the concept of working with the various facets of a character. These self-portraits range from semi-autobiographical to entirely fictional contents. This series of drawings, which Cone The Weird considers an open experiment, is rooted in his creative background as a graffiti artist. He uses his own interpretation of the common graffiti style of spreading one's own name and, by working with character design, he benefits from a variety of opportunities to convey the content of his drawings more easily. Cone The Weird always tries to master the difficult balancing act of not being too explicit or even trivial in his works (with the first running the risk of becoming purely illustrative). Cone has already left his marks in various European countries, in the USA and in Hong Kong. His works are particularly widespread in the Greater Region of Germany, France and Luxembourg. At the end of 2010, he cofounded Bureau Stabil—a bureau for communication design—together with five friends and fellow design colleagues and has been working as a freelance illustrator, graphic designer and graffiti artist. While his work as an artist is becoming ever more important, he loves to gain additional experience in the various fields of his profession. Besides participating in several group exhibitions in Europe and the USA, he has been doing a lot of travelling in the last few years to be able to spread his works around the globe. He makes no essential distinction between his murals and his drawings, but rather perceives them as forming a unity. From his perspective, these contrary works are inseparably interwoven—just like yin and yang.
