From the murky end of Lake Erie comes Eric Fargiorgio, who works as Eerie Eric and describes himself as the Bob Ross of Bigfoot.
The work he is best known for starts with somebody else's painting. Thrift shops sell old landscapes for the frames, and the picture inside — a quiet forest, a lake, a mountain at dusk — usually gets thrown away. Eric paints into them instead. A Sasquatch between the trees, a cryptid at the waterline, a saucer over the ridge.
They look exactly like the painting that hung in your grandparents' hallway, right up until you notice what is standing in it.
More than Bigfoot
Cryptids are one part of it. He also does caricatures — Ericatures — along with tattoos, pin-up work, logo design, illustration and lowbrow rock-and-roll cartooning. The influences are monsters, wrestling, tattoo flash and vintage print, which is roughly the same list either way.
The cryptid side has taken the work outward: Museum of the Weird, Cryptid Crate, Cryptomundo, The Mothboys Podcast, Bigfoot Society, Monsters Among Us, and work alongside the researcher and author Lyle Blackburn.
An Erie original
Born in Erie, trained in cartooning at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, and selling monsters at conventions and paranormal gatherings long before cryptid art became a recognisable corner of the internet. That includes the Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, where his paintings sit a few streets from the folklore that produced them.
At home he has been recognised more than once by Erie's art community, for the tattooing and the painting both.
Worth knowing
Look online, but better to catch him at a cryptid, paranormal, tattoo or oddities event, where the originals are.
If you pass an innocent old landscape with something hairy watching from the tree line, you have probably found him.
Find Their Work
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