Ed Unitsky
Official Band Artist and Designer
Ed was born in Mozyr, in the Belarusian province of the former Soviet Union, on April 25th 1962. During his childhood, his parents moved home several times, to various cities in Belarus, and so Ed was educated at different schools.
Ed’s artistic abilities were apparent from an early age when he took up sketching and painting with watercolours before graduating on to oils, air-brushing, creating large-scale, interior-design mural works and working in many other mediums.
In 2002, Ed sat down at a computer for the very first time to apply his artistic talents to digital art. He instantly fell in love with this new format, which, with its multiplicity of creative tools, allowed him to expand his artistic range enormously. Ed quickly became an artistic master of digital painting, collage assembly and photo manipulation, his computer-generated creations continuing to amaze and inspire. As a result, in a few short years, Ed has gone from being an unknown artist in a small Belarus town (ninety kilometres from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl) to a world-class computer artist recognised internationally for his CD and book covers.
In the music field, Ed is now regarded as one of the great cover artists of modern times, his artwork adorning the CD booklets of some of the best Progressive Rock bands of the modern era.
His very first commercially-released album artwork, commissioned by The Tangent for their The Music That Died Alone CD, received the ‘Best Artwork’ award for 2003 in the Dutch Progressive Rock Poll (DPRP). He went on to design the band’s covers for The World That We Drive Through (2004), A Place in the Queue (2006) (which also won at the tenth annual Dutch Progressive Rock Poll awards) and Going Off on One (2007). His cover designs for The Tangent’s A Place in the Queue and Oresund Space Collective’s All About Delay were both nominated for their outstanding artwork in the 2006 Italian Prog Awards, and in 2008 the cover artwork for The Flower Kings’ Sum of No Evil was inducted into the Italian Prog Awards Hall of Fame. In the same year Ed was asked to produce the artwork for Unitopia's double-album The Garden, which resulted in his fifth top-five entry in the DPRP.
In addition to his CD cover artwork, Ed has an impressive collection of spiritual artwork, which is also gaining recognition worldwide. Recently, he completed a portfolio for a Christian Rock Opera in Cleveland, entitled The Bargain. Within this collection is his rendition of The Last Supper (the original is almost life size) which, as you can see, was strongly influenced by the great Salvador Dali (one of Ed’s youthful inspirations).
In these few short years since he discovered computers as an artistic tool, Ed has created thousands of artwork pieces, not least of which are his new covers for Mandalaband III and IV which David asked him to create when he came across Ed’s work on the internet. The two of them work closely together, David supplying the photographs and images for Ed to work his magic on. You can see the results of their artistic collaboration on the album pages of this web site.
Ed’s art can be seen at:
edunitsky.com
edunitsky.net
shop.edunitsky.net
myspace.com/progsky
absolutearts.com
saatchi-gallery.co.uk