Gabe Richardson, recent Meeker High School graduate, began his art career very early and is currently majoring in art with an emphasis on education at Colorado Mesa University. In high school, he began posting his artwork on Instagram (@gabe_richardson_art) and has been gaining a following ever since.
“I started posting on Instagram because I thought that it would give me some good exposure and make me feel really good about the work that I was doing. It seems that people really enjoy this kind of stuff and I thought that I could get the right kind of feedback for it,” Richardson said. One of his biggest projects is his speculative biology project, “Titaneron,” which also has its own dedicated Instagram page (@titaneron_official). Speculative biology is a genre that specializes in imagining life on other worlds through the creation of fictional and imaginative worlds of alien and non-alien creatures. After being inspired by other speculative biology projects he’d seen, he began Titaneron in high school with the help of Meeker High School’s art teacher Ben Quinn. “Gabe has such a wide skill set of artistic abilities and vision. His work with ‘Titaneron’ was the assimilation of a bunch of different creative outlets from fantasy, biology and his own imagination. It was thrilling to watch him work through his process diligently as he first drew the wide breadth of creatures and added color, then created 3D models,” Quinn said.
Recently, Gabe’s Instagram presence has given him the opportunity to have his work featured in a digital magazine. Domenic Pennetta, editor and founder of “Astrovitae” magazine, found Richardson online and reached out. Pennetta created this magazine to showcase topics relating to speculative biology, art and science fiction.
MHS grad and artist Gabe Richardson was recently featured in Astrovitae magazine for his speculative biology project (left). You can follow Gabe and see more of his work on Instagram @gabe_richardson_art and @titaneron_official |
“The main goal of Astrovitae is to popularize the genre of speculative biology by highlighting artists in the community and sharing their fanciful worlds, creatures and art with readers,” Pennetta said. “I reached out to Gabe because I believed he had an interesting world to share. As the editor of Astrovitae, I strive to curate the work of larger, more well-known professional artists while also highlighting the projects of smaller creators. This way, readers get a variety of different artists and projects to experience each issue. Newer readers become interested in ‘Astrovitae’ through these larger artists and their featured projects, but eventually these readers end up staying to see work of the smaller guys. Gabe’s world, Titaneron, and all its interesting biological organisms, fit the bill of a smaller artist working to develop his imaginative world. I think it’s a great thing for the community to shine a spotlight on smaller artists like Gabe and help support their creative endeavors. By participating in Astrovitae Magazine, Gabe’s project has new fans (myself included) who will watch his world develop with great interest!”
“It is wonderful to see Gabe get published and recognized for his exemplary work.”
~ MHS art teacher and artist Ben Quinn
“It is wonderful to see Gabe get published and recognized for his exemplary work and execution of these ideas. I am excited to see the work Gabe creates, as his trajectory in the art world is straight up,” commented Quinn.
In the future, Richardson hopes to advance this project into something much larger. “I’m hoping to advance this world that I’ve made into something really large. “I hope that one day I’ll have a very large catalog of creatures, plants and cool ideas that people can look at and enjoy and read through,” Richardson said. “As of now it’s just a passion project that I work on from time to time, but hopefully in the future it’ll be a little bit more of a full time project.”
To see Richardson’s artwork, visit both @gabe_richardson_art and @titaneron_official on Instagram and see his work in the September 2022 edition of “Astrovitae” at https://www.astrovitae.com/.
By KATIE LOCKWOOD
Special to the Herald Times
