It’s that man again. Presenting the latest reworked page from the ongoing reconstruction/improvement of my Haunter of the Dark book. The picture will illustrate “Abdul Alhazred”, the final section of Alan Moore’s text for The Great Old Ones in which HP Lovecraft is positioned at Malkuth, the “Kingdom” in Alan’s eldritch Kabbalah. This makes Lovecraft himself the receptive vessel of the energies descending from the spheres above, while paradoxically being the source of those energies. Or some of them at least… The Great Old Ones is a Mythos Kabbalah which features Dagon, Hastur, Tsathoggua and Yig as well as Cthulhu and the rest. Alan doesn’t subscribe to Kenneth Grant’s baseless theory that Lovecraft really was a receptacle for transmissions from interdimensional entities, but the incorporation of the writer into his own pantheon isn’t unprecedented. Abdul Alhazred was a childhood persona of Lovecraft’s before he assigned the name to the author of Al Azif, or the Necronomicon; further personas may be found in Through the Gates of the Silver Key (“Ward Phillips”), Robert Bloch’s The Suicide in the Study (“Luveh-Keraph, priest of Bast”), and other fictions.
HPL (1937) by Virgil Finlay.
Whether this literary sport warrants the apparently limitless production of Lovecraftian art featuring the man himself, usually sprouting or festooned with tentacles, is a debatable matter. Virgil Finlay began the fantastic portrait trend in 1937 with his memorial depiction of the author writing with a quill pen while dressed in 18th-century garb. The earliest example that I can think of showing Lovecraft paired with the ubiquitous tentacles was the Moebius cover for Lettres d’Arkham in 1975, although there may well be other drawings prior to this. I’ve often wondered what Lovecraft would have made of the deluge of publications and images derived from his work, especially those that place him inside the products of his imagination.
Cover art by Moebius, 1975.
And speaking of which… I was at a loss at first with how to approach a new Lovecraft portrait, all I knew was that one was necessary. The original Malkuth picture from 1999 is another poor Photoshop job which has nevertheless been reused elsewhere on a few occasions, even appearing in 2007 on the cover of an issue of FATE magazine. For the new version I started with the portrait itself, using white lines on black to copy the same portrait photograph that formed the centre of the older picture. This was then duplicated and flipped horizontally to create a kind of Janus head which gives the portrait a suitably weird quality without wreathing it in tentacles. The mirrored head harks back to a sequence of treated photos by JK Potter which I first saw in the Heavy Metal Lovecraft special in 1979. Potter had used the same portrait photo to create effects that were somewhat compromised by poor reproduction, leading me to be believe that I’d created something slightly different to the first panel in his sequence. While researching this post I turned up an earlier version of the artwork which appeared on the back of the first issue of a US fanzine, Fantasy Mongers, also in 1979. The clearer reproduction revealed that the first head in Potter’s sequence is almost identical to my own. Ah well…
Photo art by JK Potter from the back cover of Fantasy Mongers #1, 1979.
The rest of the picture was improvised around this central image. Having drawn the portrait in white-on-black I decided to use a similar technique for the other elements. The Cthulhoid pillars are based on those in my Red-Night Rites painting from 1997, one of which appeared in the 1999 picture. The smaller figure on the right is from one of the photos that Wilfred Talman took while wandering the streets of New York with Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long. This also appeared in the 1999 picture but for the new version I’ve emphasised what appears to be a book that Lovecraft is carrying in his right hand. Searching around for a complementary figure that might represent Abdul Alhazred turned up a 19th-century photo of a character who not only looked the part but is also standing in a manner similar to the Talman Lovecraft. If you look closely he’s also carrying a book, an addition of my own which turns him into the author of Al Azif. The polyhedra supporting the pair aren’t as arbitrary as they may seem. The spheres serve a dual purpose, preventing the figures from floating in space (or standing in water) while also relating to the Sephiroth of Malkuth which is identified with the Earth in the Kabbalistic scheme of planetary associations.
The next reworked picture will be Tsathoggua which is being polished rather than completely overhauled. I’m hoping I might have this done by the end of the month but I’m still chipping away at The Dunwich Horror while doing all this, as well as working on things which pay the bills. (I’ve just finished designing and illustrating another book.) Further progress will be announced in due course.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Return of the Crawling Chaos
• Lettering Lovecraft
• Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich Horrors
• Kadath and Yog-Sothoth
• Another view over Yuggoth
In response to a recent post by Mark Valentine at Wormwoodiana announcing the reprint of one of his short story collections, I remarked on the cover depicting the image of the Three Faced King. I mentioned my own interest in the Vultus Trifons , the “Tri-Faced” Christ. This imagebecame popular in Europe in the 13th century and ultimately was condemned and suppressed because it became disturbing to the powers that be. (Not entirely successfully it turns out.) The Trifons had pagan precursors and became associated with certain heretical movements. I’ve since discovered that it was also very popular with church missionaries in Latin America. Probably not coincidentally it has some resemblance to indigenous religious imagery.
That to say I jumped a bit when I saw the image in this post. I assume you didn’t begin design of this striking image in just the last week so it may indeed be that higher forces are at work. HPL wrote that if you think about the Night Gaunts too much they begin to enter your dreams. Will the creepy Christ – or worse – now come to me in the darkness?
In due course this image must find its fate as a print or poster. The Old Ones practically demand it!
Thanks, Stephen, that’s really interesting, and something I didn’t know about at all! I was a little disappointed when I found that I’d ended up replicating the first Potter image so closely, but I still wanted to keep the mirrored effect. The first version of my portrait (without the mirroring) was done at the beginning of this year then set aside while I worked on other things. The mirrored version was done several months later but it’s still not a recent thing.
The Christ heads are a very welcome discovery, they offer an additional rationale for using the mirrored head in this portrait beyond it being a swipe from JK Potter. The picture is supposed to represent Lovecraft himself as the final god in the Kabbalah sequence, an incarnated god, as it were, just as Christ is supposed to be. The fact that the multi-faced Christs are also forbidden only adds to the associations when Lovecraft uses the word “forbidden” so much in his fiction.
I could definitely sell this as a poster print on Redbubble. I may add it there next week. I’ve not had much interest in the Yuggoth print but a Lovecraft portrait is probably a more commercial proposition.