'Psycho'.
Felipe Echevarria is an American comic book artist and fine art painter, known for his painted comic book work on Innovation Publishing's 'PSYCHO' (1993) and his own graphic novel 'Death From Above' (2019).
Early comic book work
Felipe Echevarria was born in March 1959 in San Diego, California. Upon graduation from the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon & Graphic Art in 1990, he did his first comic book work for Innovation Publishing from Wheeling, West Virginia. He painted the 3-issue comics adaptation of the famous Alfred Hitchcock film 'Psycho' (1992), as well as an issue of the comic book series based on the 1990s TV series 'Dark Shadows' with Ben Cross, all in watercolor. He completed many paintings for the Clive Barker 'Imajica' card game and created black-and-white stories for Caliber's 'Negative Burn' and Kodansha's 'Comic Morning' (Japan) anthologies, plus numerous comics covers and color and ink illustrations for many companies.
Dark Shadows: 'Book Three' #1.
Fine art
In the early 1990s the comic industry experienced a "correction period" and it was harder to find work, so by 1993 Echevarria had to move into the fine art world. There he studied with Burt Silverman and David Leffel and displayed his paintings and drawings in many fine art gallery shows. His work was primarily of women in abstract backgrounds. He also taught painting, figure drawing, and comics classes for many institutions, including the Loveland Academy of Fine Art, and the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.
Stalled projects
During this period Felipe also started to experience a severe chronic illness that eventually took over 15 years to stabilize. While in this time of withdrawal, he wrote and illustrated the graphic novel 'Death From Above', a meditation on the issues of death, dying and suffering, and how to be happy in one's life by overcoming the fear of death. It was slowly and steadily worked on for over two decades, and the first half, 80 pages, was finally published in 2019. In the mid-1990s he illustrated a story called 'Diamond-Studded Face Cage' written by Mark Laliberte, but the comic was not published, because the art got lost and wasn't recovered until 2013! The 28-page comic, about a boring fashion show wildly upset by a model wearing a face cage made of diamonds, saw final publication in 2019. Along with this long string of stalled projects is the illustrated all-ages drama 'KLOON', a seven-year effort that should see publication in 2020.
'Death From Above'.
Fan art
Since 1990 Echevarria has also drawn and painted an estimated 300 plus images of the Death character from Neil Gaiman's popular 'Sandman' comics published by DC/Vertigo. Virtually all the art has been sold and is in the hands of collectors around the world. These were all fan art, not published by Vertigo. He eventually printed his own fan art sketchbook with 32 paintings of the character in 2009, entitled 'ANKH Painted Death Sketches'. Two more sketchbooks, 'Spearwomen', and 'FemDrops' were published around this time. 'Spearwomen' again employed the image of a woman in an abstract background, this time embellished by tribal makeup on a white face. This motif has had popular appeal in the era of the "strong woman".
'Diamond-Studded Face Cage'.
Further work
Other projects include 'Stakes' written by Todd Jones, a vampire adventure series that again was stalled and only saw one issue, and many covers and comics stories for smaller independent publications. Echevarria's illustration art has also appeared three times in 'Spectrum, The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art', and in the 'Infected By Art' annuals. Felipe and artist/educator George Pratt combined for a large two-man fine art exhibition of women paintings at a gallery in Denver, Colorado in 2017.
Felipe has a studio in Loveland, Colorado, USA and is working on several graphic novel projects and new work for fine art exhibitions.
