Prehistoric folks with expressive tendencies were fond of creating art on the walls of caves. Too bad no one had yet invented canvas or sketch pads — or, for that matter, beer cans.

Indeed, as any modern small batch beer enthusiast can testify, the cans at many of the craft breweries proliferating worldwide are boasting incredible designs and artwork. It’s marketing, yes, but it goes way beyond a Budweiser logo and often becomes the domain of young, significantly talented artists.

In New London at Tox Brewing, for example, the can designs imply and depict entire narratives and mythologies about the inspiration for the beer contained therein. It’s a universe called Toxtopia.

Patrick Regan, a 27-year-old native of the Whaling City, is the illustrator behind the Tox art, and each of dozens of different cans representing the brewery’s ever-changing menu is a color-blast of Regan’s imagination. His designs fluidly fuse wit, joy, whimsy and darkness — and a glance at the cans lining the Tox walls might at any moment suggest J.R.R. Tolkien on a haunted Colonial pirate ship, H.P. Lovecraft rewriting the book of Genesis, Gustave Doré playing chess with Charles Darwin, or just a collection of cheery children’s books introducing the young ‘uns to the wonders of flora and fauna and/or pagan ritual.

Sudsy friendship

“I love working for the Tox guys,” Regan says. “It’s a great and creative relationship. They’re making beer out of love and were doing it for years in their garages before turning it into something special. And the central theme — the idea of sort of playfully exploring animals and flowers and the toxicology behind it all — gives me so much to work with.”

Regan is referring to the fact that “Tox,” which opened in its Broad Street location in 2018, was inspired by the role of toxicology in nature. The partners at Tox are co-founders Mike Zaccaro and Dayne Laskey, the latter of whom is a professor of toxicology at the University of Saint Joseph. That qualification is admittedly fascinating and, when it comes to creating Tox beers, his background in poisons, antidotes and the lore thereof in the natural world provide plenty of evocative concepts based around ingredients or the type of beer and atmosphere for any given brew.

Along with co-founding employee Jon Ahlcrona, the Toxxers continue to explore the science of brewing through a wide range of types including pilsners and lagers, stouts and IPAs, sours and fruity beers — the (decidedly not-poisonous) characteristics of which are suggested in beers like Devil’s Nightshade, Copperhead, Apparition, Angel’s Trumpet, Toxoberfest, Foxglove, Belladonna, Deadly Nightshade, Black Mamba and Dart Frog. The Dart Frog, as a matter of fact, became so popular he’s now the iconic figure of the Tox logo.

Regan didn’t know any of the Tox folks when the brewery opened; he ran across the already up-and-running brewery online. But, reading the backstory behind the name, he sent a cold-call email offering his services.

“We’d been getting a lot of emails and phone calls because we were a new brewery,” says Zaccaro. “Ingredients salesmen, distributors and even a few artists. We were long overdue for a rebranding, so I opened Pat’s email even though I didn’t have a lot of expectations. But I was so impressed by his samples, and we immediately had a meeting. It was very easy to establish that Pat could work with our vision and still have room for his own creativity, and it’s been a wonderful marriage.”

After a while, as Regan delivered a series of labels of scenery and overlapping themes based on discussions with Zaccaro, Ahlcrona and Laskey, the four realized they’d created a sort of ongoing thematic universe they now call Toxtopia.

“Every time Pat comes up with a new theme, whether it’s in a forest or it’s futuristic or whatever,” Zaccaro says, “we add to the backstory and come up with new details and connections and characters. We’re all spread thin, but we dream of having a whole graphic novel about Toxtopia. One of these days ...”

Regan says, referring to designing for a craft brewery, “It’s just cool to be part of a growing scene. Two very famous artists I really look up to do work for Connecticut breweries. Scott Buon designs for Armada Brewing in East Haven and Sam Heimer for Abomination Brewing in North Haven. I think we each have different styles, but are influenced by fantasy and folklore.” He laughs. “Not that they’d know who I am.”

If not, it presumably won’t be for long. Entering 2022, Regan is working on a can design for a new Tox brew called Inky Cap, which is a type of mushroom that’s only poisonous when consumed with alcohol. Hopefully, it will be done in time for a COVID-delayed exhibition of Regan’s Tox art that’s tentatively scheduled for late January or February in New London’s Oasis Pub — a show that would, naturally, overlap with a generous presence of Tox beers on the Oasis taps.

Way beyond beer

Illustrating fanciful narratives for a hops ‘n’ barley universe is hardly all that occupies Regan’s time and creativity. Versatile as an illustrator, graphic designer and motion graphic designer, he’s worked full time for almost six years at Astor Place Inc., a marketing/video firm in New London. He also has his own Faire Harbour Art, where he does commission work for individuals — everything from landscapes and seascapes to book covers/illustrations and band logos/cover art. He’s also involved as a designer for DJ Frank Lo’s The Famous New London clothing collaborative.

“I’ve drawn as long as I can remember. It’s not just that I knew what I wanted to do. I DID it all along,” Regan says. He’s sitting at the desk in his home studio, a spare room in an apartment he shares with his girlfriend Semra and three cats in New London’s Knob Hill neighborhood.  The office is small — probably designed to be a secondary bedroom — but it’s hardly confining. In fact, listening to Regan enthusiastically discuss his work and dreams, and looking at framed pieces on the walls or numerous sketches-in-progress laid out on a worktable, it’s fair to say the “office” serves as a mothership through which Regan giddily negotiates the variety of galaxies that bubble and coalesce in his brain.

Vast worlds await

Regan is particularly passionate about two personal side projects. Each is so long-term that Regan cheerfully acknowledges major uncertainty as to when either will be done or in what form. “I see them as graphic novels or maybe comics at first,” Regan says. “Then, someday, maybe short animations explaining events and history. Or maybe just a book of my artwork explaining the world and historical events and time lines and biographies. To be honest, I’m so excited by the characters and creating the visuals, I haven’t really figured out the plots. The ideas keep coming and I’m just having fun with it.”

One project, the most recent idea dating back a few years, is called “Faire Harbour,” which Regan describes as a “dark colonial/nautical folklore fantasy world,” a fictional work based mostly on southeastern Connecticut and aswirl with a metaphorical Battle of Groton Heights, privateers, haunted lighthouse legends, whaling, pirates and more.

The second, as yet unnamed, is a concept Regan has thought about since middle school. He wants to capture a medieval world that, he says, “draws a lot of influence from the Teutonic Order of knights hunting down pagans in Lithuania and eastern Europe in the 1300s and 1400s.”

While that bit of history is certainly full of possibilities, Regan continues to expound and impressively augments his description with finished sketches, illustrations and even a digitally produced video. The work has an ominous and attractive world-class power; a wonderfully ghastly vision of an apocalyptic but medieval scenario, he says, that’s “full of starvation and decay, zealous wackos, cruel orders of knights, cannibals, cults, pagans, theocracies, all that good stuff.”

Regan works on these two concepts as time allows, and time DOES allow. “I don’t play video games or watch much television,” he says. “I like to draw. Semra is incredibly patient. I know there are times when she’d like just to, you know, go out and do something.”

From the beginning

If all this activity and enthusiasm seems characteristic of a novice approaching a new hobby, Regan seems to have been born for this.

“My mother Marsha runs the art department at St. Bernard’s, and my dad Michael is retired,” Regan says. “Mom is an artist and has always been very supportive and encouraging of my art. My father was supportive, too, but he’s also into craft beer, and I became fascinated by the designs and artists on the cans he’d bring home.” He laughs. “So that was a help in this, too.”

As a kid, Regan, who has a younger sister and brother, was always drawing. He was fascinated by Batman and Power Rangers, comic books, and the fantasy worlds of Tolkien. He was similarly entranced by New London’s maritime history and the legends of privateers, lighthouses, pirates and innkeepers. Doré’s illustrations of The Bible and Howard Pyle’s 1921 “Book of Pirates” remain huge inspirations.

After graduating from St. Bernard, Regan majored in illustration at Hartford Art School. His interest was primarily in black and white pencil and graphite work, but curriculum introduced him to painting and color and, ultimately, digital art.

“In addition to perspective, light and shadow and figure drawing, I was sort of dragged into areas of study like digital art — and I did not want to go there. Truthfully, I didn’t understand it and was a little intimidated by it,” Regan says.

During winter break of his senior year, Regan got an internship at Astor Place and fell under the spell of Ralph Belfiglio, the company’s creative director and founding partner. Astor Place traffics almost exclusively in digital art and video, and Regan started to pick up the process of digital art quickly. More importantly, he started to love the possibilities.

“Ralph is my mentor. He taught me everything and made it fun,” Regan says. “Soon I was integrating what I knew with what I was learning and it’s an amazing process.” After Regan graduated, he was offered a full-time job at Astor Place and, he says, “I couldn’t ask for a better ‘real job.’ I don’t think of it as work and everyone there gets along so well and creatively. Plus, it’s in New London and not some big corporate town.”

Home sweet home

While Regan studied one semester in Italy and says he has certain spots in the world he’d like to see for pleasure as well as artistic qualities, he’s emphatic that he has no interest in living anywhere else besides New London. He loves the city’s creative spirit and arts scene as well as its “mom and pop vibe” and the cross-cultural aspects and demographics. Plus, there have been Regans in New London going back three generations.

“I just feel very lucky to have grown up in New London and to have a history here. It’s a magical place for me,” Regan says. “I feel comfortable, like we’re supposed to be here, and the atmosphere is always there. I sort of don’t differentiate what I’m working on at any given time. I just shift gears and look forward to whatever’s up next, and I want it to happen here.”