{lovecraft} – Page 29 – { feuilleton }

Cthulhoid and Artflakes

Cthulhoid (2012).

Hot on the scaly heels of my recent Cthulhu God comes a new collage work I was messing with over Christmas. This was done in part as a reaction to the earlier picture which I’m very happy with but which looks cleaner and flatter than I prefer for Lovecraft-related things. I’d also found some new books of copyright-free cephalopoda that I wanted to try playing with. There are trace elements here of Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur but I’ve plundered Haeckel so much in the past it’s better to search elsewhere for source material.

I’ve been selling reproductions of works such as this at CafePress but now have an additional outlet with a new print venture, Artflakes, who asked me late last year to contribute to their site. Artflakes is a German company operating as CafePress does: artists upload their pictures which can then be sold on a variety of products. The product range is smaller than their rivals but they do canvas prints which CafePress don’t. These are costly items but canvas prints tend to be expensive anyway, even at a high street copy shop. On the plus side, being based in Germany means the shipping costs will be slightly cheaper inside Europe. I’ve not uploaded much at the moment but this new piece is there together with six other works. More will be added in the next couple of months.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Cthulhu God

Happy Cthulhumas. I found the time over the past couple of weeks to finish a piece of art begun in September 2008, something I’d half-completed then abandoned due to pressure of other work. I’d quite forgotten about this until I discovered the files when going through some archive discs. What began as a pencil outline is now a lavish piece of vector art which I’ll shortly be making available as a poster design.

I’ve enjoyed creating vector pictures recently, it’s a different discipline to using Photoshop (although the initial art often starts in the sister application), and the hard lines and flat shapes remind me of the similar effects I used to get when I was painting with gouache. Some areas of this piece remain a little too flat but I didn’t want to start shading everything using gradient meshes; if you start down that road you may as well do the whole thing as a Photoshop painting—or a real painting, for that matter. That said, I wouldn’t mind giving this the hyper-realist treatment at a later date.

The original idea was to do a kind of “Cthulhu Buddha”, something like the above variation only coloured with more finesse. I kept thinking this was an original idea only to belatedly realise when I set the figure against a temple background that I’d been imitating the kind of massive Lovecraftian idols that populate the comic strips of Philippe Druillet. The one below is a good example.

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Die Farbe and The Colour Out of Space

Die Farbe (2010).

The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor’s strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all. Its texture was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to promise both brittleness and hollowness.

The Colour Out of Space (1927).

Die Farbe (The Colour) is a German feature film by Huan Vu based on HP Lovecraft’s tremendous short story The Colour Out of Space. Vu’s film was completed last year, and has been well-received at film festivals and by Lovecraft aficionados but I’ve been rather tardy in hearing about it. Better late than never.

Having adapted two-and-a-half stories, I tend to take a more than cursory interest in works based on Lovecraft’s fiction. One of the reasons I tackled his works in the first place was out of frustration at the apparent inability of film producers and comic artists to treat the stories as they’d been written. The Colour Out of Space is one of the masterpieces of Lovecraft’s mature period, and was the favourite of his own stories, a skilful blending of horror and science fiction in the tale of a fallen meteorite infecting a farm with an inexplicable process of decay and physical mutation. The mysterious colour is the product of some unearthly substance inside the meteorite which corresponds to no known part of the visible spectrum. This wasn’t the first story of Lovecraft’s that I read—I’d earlier found The Moon-Bog in a ghost story anthology—but it was the first that made a serious impression when I came across it in another anthology at age 12 or 13. Since then, whenever people ask me which Lovecraft stories to read first The Colour Out of Space is always one I recommend.

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Cthulhu under glass

Having had two separate visitors to the British Library’s Out of this World exhibition tell me that some of my work was featured there, it’s been a good to finally discover what was on display. Many thanks to John Keogh for notifying me of his exhibition photo set which includes the above shot of the relevant display case. This is an odd collection for what’s been widely advertised as a science fiction event. Pages from my 1988 adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu are in there along with other fantasy and horror titles including Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Incarnate by Ramsey Campbell, an edition of Fantasy & Science Fiction with Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood on the cover, and a Sidney Sime illustration for Lord Dunsany’s Gods of Pergana. Cthulhu originates out of this world, of course, and that phrase is general enough to encompass other genres.

This page from the climax of Lovecraft’s story was the first drawing I made of the living Cthulhu, all earlier representations following Lovecraft’s scheme of the creature manifesting throughout history in different human artworks and religious icons. Since most of those representations are highly stylised I wanted to make the awful reality seem a lot more visceral and even incoherent, hence the mass of flailing tentacles and ropes of slime. This is also the only full view you receive, everything else is fragmentary and allusive so there’s space for the reader’s imagination. I think the book in the library display is the Lovecraft anthology The Starry Wisdom but The Call of Cthulhu is also present in my Haunter of the Dark collection which includes a couple more portraits of “the green, sticky spawn of the stars”.

Out of this World is a free exhibition which will run to September 25th, 2011.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Lovecraft’s favourite artists revisited

HP Lovecraft (1937) by Virgil Finlay.

I was asked recently to join the bloggers at Tor.com writing about art as it relates to fantasy and science fiction, so for today’s post your attention is directed to this piece, an expanded version of a rather half-hearted list I put together a few years back concerning HP Lovecraft’s favourite artists. Half-hearted or not, people kept linking to that list so it seemed a good idea to make more of it. I’ll be writing these posts a couple of times a month, provided I have the time to do something worthwhile. Watch this space.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The monstrous tome