I found time recently to finish another picture for the revised edition of my Lovecraft book, a picture which I almost completed several months ago then had to set aside. Last year’s steady progress on the book’s production was brought to a halt in December as a result of a substantial and time-consuming illustration commission. I can’t complain—the new work was welcome after a rather fallow year—but it left me with none of the spare time I usually try and allot to personal projects.
The latest piece is yet another addition to the Great Old Ones section, a collaboration with Alan Moore for which Alan wrote a series of short text pieces that mapped Lovecraftian gods and locations across the spheres of the Kabbalah. If you’ve heard of Shub-Niggurath then you’ll doubtless know the additional title given to the entity: “The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young”. For the Kabbalistic scheme Alan identified Shub-Niggurath with Binah, the third sphere on the Tree of Life which represents the point at which the descent of energies from the higher spheres to the lower are infused with female qualities. In Kabbalistic terms the assignation works well, Binah being a sphere where gravid entities are preparing to give birth. For the artist, Shub-Niggurath is another Lovecraftian god that’s little more than a suggestive name; the “Black Goat” is never described in Lovecraft’s own writings, and we never learn what the “Thousand Young” may be. This gives considerable latitude to an illustrator, although most of the depictions tend to incorporate goatish features of some kind. I remain undecided about this. On the one hand the creation of a goat god is a rare example of Lovecraft carrying over attributes from pagan iconography into the unearthly realm of the Great Old Ones; Pan is the obvious forerunner here even though Pan was a male deity. On the other hand there’s the question of the degree to which we should acknowledge any physical goatishness when—as with Tsathoggua and Cthulhu—the resemblance to a terrestrial organism may be a result of a mind at the end of its tether straining for a visual description: “It looked like a…goat/toad/squid-faced dragon…!”
The Sephiroth chart from the second edition of the book, 2006.
As I say, I’m undecided but for this piece I opted for a compromise, a goat-like head supported by a monstrous body presiding over an even more monstrous progeny. My earlier depiction was another Photoshop melange, something that looked novel in 1999 but wouldn’t pass muster today. The new version is a further evolution of a form of digital drawing I’ve been developing, a process in which you draw a portion of the picture then copy and paste it to a new layer, distort it slightly using one of Photoshop’s Distort filters, then draw over and around the new section until it blends seamlessly with the rest. This has the effect of creating unpredictable forms that underly the work as a whole, rather like the Surrealist techniques of frottage, grattage, decalcomania and so on. The Surrealist processes were all the product of physical materials but the impulse is the same whatever technique you may use: the introduction of a random element that might evade the conscious input of the artist and the habitual strokes made by the drawing hand.
This leaves me now with one last god-form to be reworked, Yig the serpent deity. I’ve no idea at the moment what to do for this but something will emerge once I start playing around. I’ll also be chipping away at the new pages for The Dunwich Horror. Progress on this has been slower than I hoped but I’m still determined to finish the story. Stay tuned for further updates.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tsathoggua rising
• H.P.L.
• The return of the Crawling Chaos
• Lettering Lovecraft
• Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich Horrors
• Kadath and Yog-Sothoth
• Another view over Yuggoth
• Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos
