Meet the internet’s most famous artist

If the internet has its own singular art form, beyond memes or selective outrage, it’s probably the work of Chris (Simpsons Artist), purveyor of English surreality and the lovingly grotesque. His work is all teeth and fingers and deadpan ick, the kind dispersed across social media and nodded at with gentle understanding. “Simpsons Pictures That I Gone and Done” has 1.4 million followers on Facebook. Chris himself has a million followers on Instagram. His output resembles motivational posters by way of a lunatic. “So what if you have nits,” goes one. “They are just hairy pets.”

But who is Chris (Simpsons Artist), you ask? Beyond the social media avatar that provided him his name — a crude sketch, done in Microsoft Paint, of Homer Simpson with distorted eyes, jutting teeth and a pointy nose — he is largely a mystery, like Stone Henge but a man, or Banksy but not annoying. So we rang him up to ask.

“I wouldn’t say it’s ghastly to talk to you,” Chris says, gently. “But it is horrible.” He doesn’t tend to do interviews over the phone, he adds. “I quite like being a bit mysterious. Everyone puts so much of their lives online these days, don’t they? So it’s kind of nice to have a little bit of mystery.”

That’s that, then. I’m speaking to Chris — of parts unknown and last name redacted, but by all accounts lovely and not a total weirdo — as he’s collaborated with director Mike Greaney and the production company Blink Industries on a new series of animated shorts. They’re oddball little trifles about the fundamentals of existence, called I’m Glad I Know That Now Thank You. One is about mingling, another is about phones, and one is about death. A woman doesn’t notice her son’s head is on fire. A man lays a glowing egg on a picnic date. Another man swivels his tongue around an iPhone, like that contestant who shoved a whisk in his mouth on Come Dine with Me. One short is available now, the other two premiering in the coming weeks. The comedian Joe Lycett narrates them.

“I decided on the coddling one because I really like it,” Chris explains. “I’ve won lots of competitions, so that was quite an easy choice.” The second film, too. “I’ve done art about phone addiction before, and that’s just drawn from reality, I suppose.” The third is more personal. “My dad passed away a few years ago, and I haven’t really dealt with it in my work,” he says. “So I thought, ‘I’m gonna do death for that one’.”

It’s the saddest, understandably. But also the most beautiful, tracing the entirety of a life from being swaddled in a hospital crib (“Hello my name is baby”) to floating off at the end of everything to the great big abyss in the sky. And all three shorts carry Chris’s hallmarks, in their tributes to Cronenbergian body horror to their love of a particular kind of alluring freakiness. Scan through his older output and you’ll see what I mean: the woman with her limbs stuck in four Pringles tubes; inspirational drops of wisdom like “How to get the perfect beach body: eat loads of sand”, or “Who cares if your son is a bee”; the cast of Friends as distorted ghouls named Rass, Rakel and Mothra. Everyone’s physique is too long, too squat or too gloopy.

“I just draw the way I see things, really,” Chris says. “Maybe I’ve got a really weird body and I’m just drawing from that.” (As I am speaking to Chris over the phone, I cannot confirm this, sadly.) Chris has no real process with his work. “Sometimes I’ll have an idea while I’m in the bath,” he says. “Or I’m sleeping and then I wake up with an idea, which I write down. I try not to think about it too much.”

Still, people love them. They’ve been the basis of photo books and merchandise, and speak to everyday mores in ways that feel malformed and confusing, but altogether true. “I hope they make people smile and I hope they make people feel something,” Chris says, though he doesn’t like to unpack it. I suppose because it’s always a bit silly to try and unpack things that become popular on the internet. He’s just grateful that people feel emotions when they look at his work.

“If you feel good about it, then you feel good. If you feel sad about it, then you feel sad. And that’s just life, isn’t it?”