David Weinhold

David Weinhold (b. 1994) is a Pittstown, NJ-based multimedia artist whose practice reflects a deep fascination with hard sci-fi, horror, fantasy, and historical fiction. “My earliest memory of making art is as a kid at the drawing desk in the play corner at school. I’d make up stories with characters, cryptids, and other monster creations. I liked creating a world of my own.”

In his recent work, Weinhold turns to gouache to summon the dark, vivid images that permeate his imagination. A deep red Jersey Devil hovers over the South Jersey Pine Barrens. The Chupacabra stands frozen, its glowing red eyes fixed on the viewer, framed by the desert hues of a southwestern sunset. “My work really got serious in high school when I began my graphic novel project, Brain Right.” From his book bag, he pulls a weathered journal, its pages nearly filled cover to cover with comic strip-like sketches and speech bubbles narrating a Frankensteinian tale about the creation of a robot aptly named, “Stein Tron.”

Weinhold’s worldbuilding brims with dystopian landscapes, monsters, and imagined forms of terror and wonder. Just as the conversation settles on his graphic novel, he shifts gears to share another dimension of his practice: his digital illustrations. “I like walking around taking photos of empty places, then uploading them into Photoshop to add my drawings.” On his phone, he scrolls through scenes: a bus stop crowded with waiting aliens, a diner booth where monsters mingle over a shared meal.

Whether painting, illustrating, or drawing, Weinhold constructs the world he wants to inhabit, one where aliens, monsters, and supernatural creatures move among us, at once bored and delighted by the mundane, ever curious about the unknown.