Come fall in love with the monochrome characters of Stephan Dybus Malblock

It’s perfectly acceptable to become dangerously obsessed with a face in a painting – countless viewers have been knocked sideways by the gaze of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, not to mention the many in-head love affairs people have had with Manet’s bar girl in the last century. The same feeling hit me when flicking through Stephan’s portfolio and coming face to face with the boy in the picture below (bottom left, hand on chin) who turns out to be just one of the many of Stephan’s characters you can fall in love with.

Predominantly working in black and white (unless you count his earlier, weirder work) his ability to cram whole personalities into some relatively basic illustration is nothing short of magnificent.