Mike Estefan is an illustrator, painter, graphic designer and bedroom composer. This jack of all trades has his work on Band Camp, Soundcloud and Instagram while carrying a robust Etsy store. Estefan’s work is filled with an interest in multi-culturalism, the supernatural and the surreal.
Recently, Mike Estefan has taken all of his artistic inspirations and mashed them all together, creating watercolor and ink paintings that are now up for sale from Weridhaus Warehouse. In his past work, Estefan has shown a penchant for a more doodled, animated style in his artwork. At times it reminds me of the more unsettling bits from Ahh Real Monsters or Spongebob Squarepants when he’s drying out. Estefan’s recent release of watercolors puts this style on display in full force. The pieces feel like collages of the artists imagination, densely populated by strange faces and characters. Or showing his interest in the artwork of past cultures. Dousing ink dot drawings of totems and masks in a shade of yellow, both suggesting their place ago place in history and the bright eternal energy one feels when looking upon these items.
His other watercolors can perhaps be thought to be the mirroring of the totems and monoliths in Estefan’s mind. His most recent piece at the time of this writing is a series of faces, melding to fit the frame of a dour balding man with thin lips and a potato head above the words Low Life. His head is surrounded by log shaped otters, sinister roosters, smiling three-eyed aliens and a Snoopy look-alike named Buddy. Booger green is spattered in places all around the ink line drawings, pooling in a sickly puddle at the bottom. It’s uncomfortable, overwhelming and compellingly hilarious all at once. Whether you’re getting the strangely powerful or simply just the powerful, everything Mike Estefan does is worth a look.
