A trio of rescued rabbits scurry inside the safety of a cage just outside Skinner's Del Paso art studio. The sun-drenched backyard, which boasts a sleeping cat, oozes serenity, and suggests a nurturing owner.

Nowhere is a clue that inside the studio a chaotic world of monsters and demons rules. And the ruling is done inside a painterly brew, where horror is wrought over canvas and paper.

Skinner, 33, serves as the overlord. Born Warren Davis III, the artist uses a family nickname as his calling card.

He ushers monsters into being while sitting at a drawing table. It's a table that's seen a lot of action from one of the more prolific artists in the street art world.

Skinner's paintings, murals and installations are as prized in Tokyo as they are in Rome, or at Comic-Con, though his high-wattage career is lost on most Sacramentans.

"I just tell them I travel and paint," said Skinner, unfazed. His breezy demeanor and skater-dude affability give the impression that his success is accidental. "People see my art, and they expect some crazy person or party animal."

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

"When I first encountered Skinner's artwork, I thought the guy was totally insane," said Justin Giarla, founder, curator and owner of the seminal San Francisco street art salon known as the Shooting Gallery . "When I met him, he wasn't what I'd envisioned. He was a nice, well-spoken young man who loved to make crazy demon art."

Giarla first showed Skinner's work in 2006.

"He'll have a long career because he's prolific and hard-working," said Giarla. "He's passionate about the artwork, and he pays a lot of attention to his installations. Throughout history, artists that have given a lot of attention to installations have gone on to be successful."

Although the works inside his studio are filled with the chaotic and profane, there is a certain calculated order. Tacked across a large wall is a neat array of 1970s-era comic books that Skinner said had a profound effect on him as a youth growing up in the rural community of Cool, and later on as a teen in Auburn.

For him, the comic book style reflected part of his artistic DNA. "The comic book graphic style offers the quickest and sharpest way of expressing something," he said.

The art form bled into Skinner at the same time that the short stories of H.P. Lovecraft, such as "The Lurking Fear," began getting under his skin.

And so Skinner has carved out a niche where rabid aliens and lurking demons are recurring characters.

Lately Skinner has been working on a series of paintings in which the darkness and conflict have evolved into something more poetic and redemptive.

"Skinner's previous work had tight lines and sharp black outlines," Giarla said, "and now his new work introduces watercolors and pastels. Whereas the world before offered chaos, this new work seems to inhabit a bright, dream state."

New style on display

Those works will be shown in his upcoming solo show, "The Fragile Art of Existence," which opens Aug. 6 at the Shooting Gallery. One painting offers loaded symbolism: One of Skinner's creatures holds an infant.

"These new changes in my work coincide with the personal changes I'm making in my life, especially with issue of control and taking risk," Skinner said. "I'm trying to become a more peaceful person with my career and with where I am emotionally."

Getting to that stage has not been easy. The artist lived as a child on a bucolic 3-acre farm in Cool, but his home life was anything but idyllic. The troubles in the home led to his mother and father separating when he was 6.

Skinner coped by doing lots of drawing. These were mostly of ninjas, dinosaurs and comic book characters, said his mother, Robin Draghli.

Many of the drawings are still in Skinner's possession, and he likes to show them off in his studio – like one of a boldly colorful dinosaur dripping blood that he rendered finely in crayon, glue and charcoal in the first grade.

The family moved to Auburn where, as a single mother, Draghli raised Skinner and his sister. Though removed from his father, the household stress Skinner experienced was not as easy to escape.

"I remember having tons of nightmares because at the time I saw adults as being very unpredictable," he said. "These were nightmares about things like Indians with three eyes."

Living on a farm in Cool fed some of the imagery which would appear later in his work.

"It was like a 'Twin Peaks' kind of place where coyotes would come onto the property, and where my mother shot a dog straight through the heart," he said. "Living near these forests, and being alone a lot formed my connection to the vast unknown."

As a teen attending Placer High School in Auburn, he continued drawing. At 17, Skinner said he suffered a brain injury as a passenger in a four-car pileup on Highway 49. His return to high school four days later, with a broken nose and black and blue bruises, served to deepen his growing alienation.

"People were freaked out," he said, adding that it would take him eight years to fully recover from memory gaps and the absence of taste and smell.

"That experience intensified my connection to art because I was further removed from the immediacy of the world," he said.

Drawing became a major coping mechanism for Skinner, and his artwork began to bring attention.

A teacher remembers

"Skinner is the most amazing student I've ever had," said Larry Alberts, one of his art teachers at Placer High School. "He was just different, and so creative."

Alberts said Skinner did not take direction well. On one assignment, in which drawing a landscape was required to grasp concepts of foreground and background, Skinner drew a landscape filled with rocks.

"There was no foreground, no background, no meadows or trees," said Alberts. "It was very colorful. I think he was already laying the groundwork for what he does now."

After graduation, Skinner said, he took a $30,000 settlement from the car wreck and bought a Victorian home in midtown. The drawing stopped. "I bought music and was a deadbeat for two years."

When the money ran out, Skinner took odd jobs building boxes and detailing cars at Harv's Car Wash. But soon he started drawing again. Along the way, he took drawing lessons from local artists Fred Dalkey and Laureen Landau.

In 2003, he had his first showing at Sacramento's Toy Room Gallery. He sold more than 100 paintings, but his career did not take off until his show at San Francisco's 111 Minna Gallery, where he sold 30 paintings.

He began to realize that being an artist could turn into a career. Throughout, the themes of monsters, lurkers and aliens stayed constant.

"He was making this kind of art when no one was interested in it," said Giarla. "He's stayed true to himself, and that's why I believe he will be successful."

For Skinner, conjuring works of horror and chaos is nothing more than holding up a mirror to a troubled world.

"People ask me why I paint such horrible things, and I tell them to look around, because the world … it's pretty horrible place," he said. "I see a world of suffering and conflict, and my art reflects that.

"It is my way of negotiating living in this time. That's not to say I dwell in negativity … because I've dedicated my life to fighting it."

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