Finalist Spotlight: Richard Redwin
We asked each of the finalists in our Universal Monster’s re-design competition a few questions about their piece. Today we’re looking at Richard Redwin’s Blood Bank.
Tell us about your re-design concept.
My piece casts Dracula as a banker with a ghoulish twist, saving and lending blood instead of money. I see Banker Dracula as equal parts loan shark, ruthless salesman, backalley surgeon, and blackmarket trader in human organs I think the hanging blood-bags really round out the image. I find them inherently creepy, and I like that their medical-ness corrupts an otherwise wonderful thing like giving blood.
I call it ‘The Blood Bank’.
Where did you get the idea for this concept?
The idea started as a visual play on the word ‘bloodsucker’ – a cheap shot at the banks for their culpability in the recent economic crisis. But the more I considered it the more it made sense: Dracula as a banker in some twisted, blood-based economy; a pale, cold corpse in a dusty suit, smoothly expositing the benefits of depositing your blood with Transylvania Savings…
How long did your piece take to complete?
I painted Blood Bank over about three days in acrylics. It probably took 6 hours total. I’m relatively new to painting, so there was a lot of fiddling to get the picture the way I wanted it.
Why did you pick Dracula?
I always loved Dracula, ever since I was a kid. He was my favourite Halloween costume for years, and I kept loving proper vampires despite the desperate-to-be-cool twilight vampire thing that’s been going on for a while now. He’s one of the all-time greatest baddies, up there with Darth Vader or The Joker. And he’s the most seductive villain ever created – because who hasn’t thought about how fucking cool it would be to be a vampire, at least once?
