L'Angelo d'Mysterioso
Active Member
I'm no good at delivering eulogies so I'm not even going to try.
What I am going to do is write a few things about Alex The Madman.
So, to begin; I didn't know Alex that well, I never used teen chat or spent time in groups of which he was a part of, on whatever social media app is the new great thing. I knew Alex through graphics forum.
Of course, I knew who Alex was, he was the chatter with the greatest and most hypnotic signature on forums, the chatter who was always helpful to anyone who had issues with forums, and the admin who always stood by his mods while being fair in the complaints forum.
However I had never actually spoken to him until he sent me a message about one of the pictures I'd posted here, a Keith Richards picture I'd drawn (extremely roughly) as part of a series of guitar heroes. He was very complimentary about it, overly complimentary even, and as I replied we started talking (as one does) about rock photographers and iconic musicians, bands I had never heard of and so on.
Then one day he started a thread in photography forums showing musicians on stage, photographs taken by himself. I had no idea who any of the bands or musicians were, but the pictures were amazing. Alex had an eye for composition and catching the moment in a photo I'd rarely seen, made more remarkable by the fact the photos he'd posted here weren't really his best work (due to band copyright or whatever).
I posted a reply and sent him a message, saying how much I liked his work, and he replied, saying that he would like to see what I would do with them. So eventually we came to this solution; I would draw a picture around his photos, which I would only post here and not use anywhere else. I agreed to this and completed a rough picture showing two musicians in satanic masks on the shores of Acheron.
Alex was very kind about my attempt, although I didn't think it was as good as his photograph, and as a result never made a finished picture. He never stopped encouraging me to try something new in my work, and left his offer to attempt something with his photos open, one of the last things he wrote to me said that I should stop messing about with crap drawing software and get something decent, as he'd "be interested in seeing what I'd do with something good".
So, here is my attempt, not completed entirely, yet near enough to show (I'll swap it with the finished version when it's completed).
I hope this thread does not upset or anger those who knew Alex best, that is not my intention. I just wanted to post something in memory and celebration of who he was in my experience.
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