Illustration: Watch Ryan Travis Christian turn charcoal into surrealist nightmares

Ryan Travis Christian first cropped up on the site way, way back when we used to run guest posts at the recommendation of Ann Toebbe. Crazily we’ve never followed up with him since, which is strange because we’re genuinely intoxicated by his extraordinary charcoal drawings that fuse the natural world with Disney faces, paranoia and pop culture and middle-American suburbia with a whole heap of really weird shit. We love it, and we love the fact that there’s someone out there using a medium as traditional and marginalised as charcoal to create something utterly surreal. Anyway, here’s some work from his last show that took place last year; it’s pretty astounding.