“What is best in life?”
“To create manly art that will stand the test of time and drive other artists before you.”

I have it on fairly good authority that Ganbat Badamkhand turned forty years old yesterday. "Ganbat Badamkhand?", you say. Yeah, Ganbat may be the coolest artist you’ve never heard of.

The info on Badamkhand is sketchy at best. The consensus is that he's an artist from Mongolia. He does work primarily for video games. Beyond that, it all fades into mirages and sarabands.

The one thing we do know here in the West is that Ganbat Badamkhand kicks ass. I've stated elsewhere that Eastern European artists have stolen a march or two on their Western counterparts, crafting works of art with true fire, blood and steel mixed in with the paint and pixels. The same can be said of Badamkhand and some other Central Asian artists. There is a certain power inherent in living amid seas of grass astride a spirited horse., with Father Sky above you and the Four Winds to guide you. One can see it in art from Vasnetsov to Remington. In the case of Ganbat, that tradition is an unbroken line going back for millennia.

Badamkhand obviously taps into that power. He's known men who have lived with their lives nailed to their spines--as Robert E. Howard put it. While Gambat can do dynamic action, his forte is "contained power", the same aesthetic and vibe that Frazetta brought to paintings like "The Barbarian". The men in Badamkhand's art are moments away from unleashing hell.

Just as Frazetta created timeless art with his "Kubla Khan" portfolio and Roy Krenkel with his illos for The Sowers of the Thunder and The Road of Azrael, Badamkhand has rendered depictions of Vikings and medieval knights that will stand the test of time. Looking through his portfolio, one can see that "badass" is the main requirement, though his heart remains in the Gobi.

I can only hope to see his work on book covers at some point. He has done the cover for one metal album, so far, so there's that.

Happy birthday, Ganbat.