Octavio Diaz

By: Tobin Bennison

Article Category: Skilled Labor Leave a Comment

While Victor Frankenstein is rightly considered one of fiction’s most original and compelling characters, he’s also one of its most misunderstood, the odd Mel Brooks satire notwithstanding.

But long before Gene Wilder turned him into an inept, wild-maned hack, he’d been portrayed in film and knock-off literature as an malevolent megalomaniac, whose quest for godhood eclipsed any responsibility for his creation. Adding insult to injury, that creation went on to overshadow its namesake, and by the 1930s poor Victor’s complex persona had been wholly subsumed by a flat-pated ghoul with two bolts sprouting from his neck.

When 19-year-old Mary Shelley first conceived of Victor back in 1817, she imagined a much gentler man, who while having something of the Faust about him, was simply a tragic victim of his own brilliance and naive ambition. His creation (unnamed in the novel, but referred to simply as “the creature”) gave the original story much of its dramatic movement and captured the public’s terrified imagination, but the real key to “Frankenstein; or, The Modern  Prometheus” lies within Victor’s tortured soul.

Melbourne Beach artist Octavio Diaz isn’t exactly what you’d call a tortured soul, but his mind, by his own admission, is certainly skewed. And like Victor Frankenstein, he creates vibrant, sometimes unsettling life from scraps of dead material.

Born in Cuba and raised in Miami, Diaz first began drawing in junior high when he discovered Zap Comix and the artwork of Robert Crumb. “I started with pen and ink, and learned by imitating the styles I saw,” he says. “I imitated. Badly.”

From there he developed his own style, informed by Cubism and rigid, geometric shapes. A move to Melbourne Beach in 1987 injected another strong influence: Surfing. “Around that time I realized I could make a living with my art,” he tells me. “Soon my work went in a more commercial direction. ”

Diaz soon found work designing t-shirts for renowned Hawaii-based surfboard manufacturers Town & Country. In keeping with the era’s ethos, many of those designs incorporated garish strokes of color and “New Wave” forms, and some found their way onto Martin Potter’s boards as logos and fanciful graphics.

During this time, Diaz also juggled work with Florida Today, where as a staff artist he contributed airbrushed designs to compliment articles on a variety of subjects. Mastering Photoshop in 1993, he began to develop his “digital collage” style, blending disparate photographic components to create some inventively humorous images.

“It began subconsciously,” he remembers. “I’d always been drawing caricatures with pencil. It just seemed natural to carry them over into Photoshop, and that made them come out even stronger.” That style, now inextricably linked with his name, is marked by caricatures of outcasts, freaks, and general eccentrics whose exaggerated features fairly jump off the page.

Last year, after staff restructuring at the paper, Diaz was let go, but turned disappointment into opportunity. “I realized I’d be limited in my options if I continued working solely for papers,” he muses. “They tend to like singular styles and mine veer pretty far from the norm.”

In addition to working as a graphic artist for the Daytona Beach News Journal, Diaz has branched out into freelance design work, having created images for the likes of Forbes, 2.0, PC Magazine, Computer Life, Sports Illustrated, McGraw-Hill, and Fortune Small Business. His ingenious combinations of scanned images, photos and geometric shapes might seem like odd choices for such relatively conservative publications, but their strange appeal helps keep each issue’s content fresh and current.

Many of the photos he employs are taken during his daily travels, with interesting textures such as wrinkled vinyl, scuffed leather, and stippled surfaces being the most sought after subjects. Facial features are culled from Diaz’s large catalogue of photos and his own scanned hands figure into many of the pieces.

Although much of Diaz’s freelance work depicts high-strung people at odds with technology, his most popular creations are the result of personal experiments. The outrageous “General Tequila,” based on a real personage who, similarly attired, dispenses tequila shots at local conventions is one of Diaz’s favorites, along with “Surf Devil,” the embodiment of an unchecked passion for waves.

Diaz is currently at work on a series of famous rock stars imagined in their childhood. A wraithlike Marilyn Manson exhibiting the first signs of aberration has recently been completed and a gloomy Trent Reznor is almost finished. If Diaz sees the project through, there’s a distinct danger of his  sharing poor Victor Frankenstein’s fate as a misunderstood madman. But fret not; With creations as unique and jarring as these, his name is sure to live on.

View Octavio Diaz’s online portfolios at these sites: www.theispot.com/artist/odiaz; www.newspagedesigner.com, and http://octaviodiaz.blogspot.com

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