HP Lovecraft – { feuilleton }

Salvator Rosa’s witches

Self-portrait (1650).

Weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth. Upon everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. I did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no region to sleep in. It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror.

HP Lovecraft, from The Colour Out of Space

My recent reading has included some of ETA Hoffmann’s stories, ostensibly his weird tales although there hasn’t been anything especially weird about the ones I’ve read so far. One of these, Signor Formica, is a novella-length piece with Italian artist Salvator Rosa (1615–1673) as the main character, a story that adds a layer of fiction to the rumours and apocrypha the artist accumulated like so many coats of varnish. Hoffmann has Rosa arriving in Rome where he spends little time painting and much more time operating as a highly proficient agent of vengeance for a younger artist. The real Rosa was proficient enough without anyone having to exaggerate his accomplishments. In his early life he trained as a musician; in the years when he was struggling to sell his paintings he worked as an actor, and had some success as a writer of satirical plays. The theatrical side of Rosa’s career is one that Hoffmann exploits in his story.

The Witches’ Sabbath (c.1635/1654).

Hoffmann says surprisingly little about Rosa’s paintings—a familiarity on the part of his readership seems to be taken for granted—but Signor Formica had me looking them up again, especially the more grotesque examples of which there are many to choose from. Rosa was somewhat ahead of his time in both his subject matter and its handling, providing an artistic link between the late Mannerists and the Romantics of the 1800s who would find much to admire in his dark and violent depictions of witches and the bandits of Southern Italy. The bandit pictures were especially popular in the 1800s but since we’re now in the Season of the Witch it seems fitting to look at Rosa’s witches, or those that are visible in the murk of his shadowy canvases. Rosa’s streghe are a fearsome lot, as are the nameless creatures who attend their ceremonies. The monsters you find in older paintings can often seem more comical than frightening but there’s little that’s comical about these snapping assemblages of slaughterhouse remains.

Scenes of Witchcraft: Morning (c.1645–49).

Scenes of Witchcraft: Day (c.1645–49).

Scenes of Witchcraft: Evening (c.1645–49).

Scenes of Witchcraft: Night (c.1645–49).

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Los mitos de Cthulhu

Appearing on Spanish bookshelves this month is Los mitos de Cthulhu, a 576-page story collection which I spent the first half of this year illustrating. This is my third illustrated Lovecraft for Editorial Alma, with an introduction by ST Joshi and translations by Jesús Cañadas, and is easily the biggest to date in both size and page count. The book is a hardback with an obi strip, and includes a feature which Alma have been applying to other titles in this series, with a single illustration (in this case a panorama of the risen R’lyeh) that covers the front and back endpapers while also wrapping across the sprayed page edges. You may have noticed that sprayed edges have become a minor trend in the publishing world especially with big collections like this one. The edition of Frankenstein that I illustrated for Alma was given sprayed edges when reprinted at a larger size in the USA and Poland but Los mitos de Cthulhu is the first book I’ve worked on where I’ve had to create something specifically for this effect. What I’ve yet to see is another publisher spraying the page edges with a single illustration that runs inside and outside the book.

Where the interiors are concerned, the brief was to create ten full colour, double-page illustrations for a collection of twelve stories, with the choice of illustrations being left in my hands. This was obviously going to involve a lot of work but I was pleased to be given an opportunity to create a new series of digital paintings in full colour. In recent years I’ve done so much digital collage, monochrome drawing or vector illustration that the realistic painted side of my work feels unduly neglected. Some of the stories I ended up choosing were ones I’d illustrated before but a few of them I was tackling for the first time.

In rough order of completion, the story list is as follows:

The Call of Cthulhu

Not my first view of R’lyeh but this is the first one I’ve done where the ruins look like they’ve been underwater for a very long time. The book’s endpapers were created last, when all the illustrations had been completed. This required adding an extension to the piece above, a tricky business with a digital artwork but not as difficult as it would have been using physical media.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

This, on the other hand, is my first visit to Innsmouth. Since all these illustrations run across two pages I’ve tried to give both halves of each picture a point of interest while avoiding the placement of anything important in the centre. Among other things this has avoided my usual propensity towards compositions based on a central vertical axis.

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Weekend links 844

Crivelli’s Room I (1967) by Gillian Ayers.

• “This is the first film ever made about HP Lovecraft—and almost no one has seen it. Shot in 1989–90, it features unique interviews with Lovecraft’s friends and colleagues. It has sat unfinished for more than thirty-five years. We need your help to complete it and release it for the first time.” Lovecraft: When the Stars are Right, a documentary directed by Seán Martin, is asking for funding assistance to help digitise the extant footage. Watch the crowdfunding trailer.

• New music: Oblique by Ghost Dubs; Serpentine by Christer Bothén / Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin; The Cardboard Falcon by Mico Nonet.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Lost Stradivarius, by John Meade Falkner.

• At Nautilus: Kristen French talks to Devon Stoliker about the latest researches into psilocybin experiences using an fMRI scanner.

• At Colossal: “On vintage boards, Lou Benesch conjures the fantastic world of The Magician”.

• Amazonie (2020): music by Jonathan Fitoussi; animation by Jules Guérin.

• The Strange World of…Adam Curtis.

• RIP Frank Beard.

• Rolling Stone

• The Pink Room (1988) by Seigen Ono | The Darkened Room (1995) by David Toop | The Room Of Accidental Geometry (2000) by Harold Budd

Weekend links 843

Total solar eclipse over Zaragoza, Spain, 12th August, 2026. Photograph by Ruiyu Zhang.

• Kenneth Anger (again), in a transcript for another KPFA radio interview, in which we Anger have mentioning HP Lovecraft. Not a major revelation in itself but it’s not something I’ve seen before. On a related note, Anger wrote to August Derleth in 1947 asking permission to adapt The Dreams in the Witch House for one of his films. Another tantalising might-have-been from the Anger filmography, along with his unfinished film of Maldoror. (Thanks to Hagen for the info.)

• A recording of Jon Hassell’s final concert (London, 2015) will be released later this year as Music Is Invisible, which will become the third part of the Pentimento series. This may not be the last Hassell album, however. Other live recordings exist, and you could make a substantial compilation from all the one-off pieces Hassell recorded over the years.

• No City Fun: Manchester in 1979 (again) in a short film by Charles Salem with the music of Joy Division on the soundtrack.

• New music: Melting Days by Lusine; Yours Sincerely by Haruomi Hosono; Seedhead by Avi Engel.

• At Unquiet Things: Rebecca Chaperon‘s dreaming thresholds and painted portals.

• Mix of the week: Bleep Mix #322 by Tyondai Braxton.

• Finalists for the Ocean Photographer of the Year.

• Old music: Arles 75 Sechs by Can.

• RIP John Crowley.

• Eclipse (1968) by The Moving Sidewalks | Total Eclipse (1974) by Billy Cobham | Eclipse (1998) by Talvin Singh

Lovecraft’s Brood

It’s that man again, or some of his progeny, infecting the world with their nightmares. Lovecraft’s Brood is a story collection edited by Ellen Datlow, a kind of follow-up to Lovecraft’s Monsters, although the new book is a more expansive take on the Lovecraftian weird tale. As with the earlier collection, I designed and illustrated this one throughout. The illustrations were more of a challenge this time since the stories weren’t always focused on explicitly physical threats; or if they were, the threats remained either unseen or inexplicable. That can be good sometimes—there’s a tendency in horror illustration to always go for monster portraits or spoilerish scenes from the end of the story—but it doesn’t make the artist’s task an easy one. For a few of the pictures I used a minor detail; in the case of Mister Ainsley, for example, there’s a mention of taxidermy experiments which is what I chose to focus on. What “Mister Ainsley” looks like (or actually is) is never described as such, the reader’s imagination is left to fill the gaps in the story.

Among the other pictures there’s my first ever drawing of the real church that gave Lovecraft his model for the home of The Starry Wisdom cult in The Haunter of the Dark. This church, or its fictional counterpart, has haunted my imagination for a long time, being the subject of my first Lovecraft illustration in 1979 and (of course) the subject of my first Lovecraft comic strip in 1986. In Lovecraft’s Brood the church appears in The Beholder’s Share, another fine riff on Lovecraft’s fiction by Caitlín R. Kiernan in which the Starry Wisdom cult actually existed, with the old Catholic church on Federal Hill being the centre of their operations. The real church was demolished in 1992 but the location is still easy to find since the grounds have been turned into a small recreational area which retains the walls that surrounded the building. When I was in Providence in 2015 I walked over to Federal Hill to see a concert performance in a converted cinema but I didn’t manage to visit the site of the church, something I now regret.

On the technical side, this set of illustrations is the first where I’ve used Glitch Lab in the creation of some of the artwork. Glitch Lab is one of several tablet-based image-processing apps made by Ilixa that function like Photoshop’s filters but with many more options. Photoshop hasn’t done much with its basic suite of filters since the 1990s, something that doesn’t bother me most of the time but every so often you find yourself wanting to imitate a technical effect that can’t easily be achieved without a lot of work. For two of these illustrations I wanted views seen through different kinds of monitors, the first a low-quality TV screen of a type you’d see in a supermarket, then a distorted image from a malfunctioning camera whose output is being viewed on a computer monitor. Glitch Lab specialises in this kind of technical distortion, and can imitate a wide range of visual glitches of a type generated by old TV sets. The Note is the story with the security camera for which I painted a relatively minimal greyscale scene. This wouldn’t have worked on its own but running it through the filters gave it the required appearance. Wind Come Down the Mountain is much more heavily processed, and could have been pushed a lot further but I’d already destroyed a lot of the detail I’d put into the picture.

Lovecraft’s Brood is out now in print and digital from Tachyon and all the usual outlets.

Once Seen by Conrad Williams.

Mister Ainsley by Steve Rasnic Tem.

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