Cthulhu – Page 9 – { feuilleton }

The Gods of HP Lovecraft

Yig for Rattled by Douglas Wynne.

Presenting one of this summer’s bigger projects, these are my drawings for The Gods of HP Lovecraft, a collection of 12 all-new stories edited by Aaron French for JournalStone. After I’d begun work I was asked whether I could illustrate all 12 stories but since I was already busy with The Monstrous it wasn’t possible. My drawings occupy the second half of the book, with the first half being filled out with suitable illustrations by Paul Carrick and Steve Santiago. The contents are as follows:

Call the Name by Adam LG Nevill (Cthulhu)
The Dark Gates by Martha Wells (Yog-Sothoth)
We Smoke the Northern Lights by Laird Barron (Azathoth)
Petohtalrayn by Bentley Little (Nyarlathotep)
The Doors that Never Close and the Doors that Are Always Open by David Liss (Shub-Niggurath)
The Apotheosis of a Rodeo Clown by Brett J. Talley (Tsathoggua)
Rattled by Douglas Wynne (Yig)
In Their Presence by Christopher Golden & James A. Moore (The Mi-Go)
Dream a Little Dream of Me by Jonathan Maberry (Nightgaunts)
In the Mad Mountains by Joe R. Lansdale (Elder Things)
A Dying of the Light by Rachel Caine (Great Race of Yith)
Down, Deep Down, Below the Waves by Seanan McGuire (The Deep Ones)

Mi-Go for In Their Presence by Christopher Golden & James A. Moore.

Despite having produced a fair amount of Lovecraft-related illlustration there’s still some areas of his work that I haven’t touched, especially where creature portraits are concerned. So this collection features my first attempts at rendering one of the Mi-Go and one of the Yithians from The Shadow Out of Time. The latter are often represented as fearsome monsters which always strikes me as erroneous when so much description in the story is devoted to their book reading and archive building. Aliens, yes, but monsters they are not. There was some concern when I delivered the artwork that the fine lines and detail might not print so well on paperback stock but the printing is excellent throughout. I recommend this collection for anyone in the mood for some new Lovecraftian fiction.

Night-Gaunt for Dream a Little Dream of Me by Jonathan Maberry.

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Weird metal

Weird metal isn’t A Thing, is it? I reckon it ought to be A Thing, especially when so much black/death/doom/drone metal intersects with The Weird. I mentioned last month that British doomsters The Wounded Kings had used my De Profundis piece for the gatefold and poster insert in their reissue of The Shadow Over Atlantis. My copy of the album arrived this week; it’s a handsome production that sounds tremendous so I’m very pleased to be associated with it. The relationship to Cthulhu isn’t as overt as more well-known compositions such as The Call of Ktulu by Metallica or Cthulhu Dawn by Cradle of Filth. But those are one-off pieces whereas The Shadow Over Atlantis sustains its atmosphere of cosmic dread throughout. It’s available from Ván Records, and I recommend it highly.

All of which reminded me that my Lovecraftian art has featured sporadically in the metal world over the past few years. In the margins of my discographic work you’ll find the following releases.

Thought-Cathedral (2000) by Of Trees and Orchids.

The perennially popular view of R’lyeh is featured on the cover of the second album by a German death metal band who later changed their name to Ingurgitating Oblivion. Inside the CD there’s also a detail from a Cthulhu drawing of mine.

Azathoth (2007) by Azathoth.

There are many bands named after Lovecraft’s chaotic deity. This group is from the US, and this EP is their only substantial release to date.

Demonstration 1998 (2009) by Portal.

And there are many groups named Portal. This lot are Australian, and have been going longer than most. Demonstration 1998 is a reissue on 7-inch vinyl of a cassette demo from 1998; the sleeve art shows a fuzzy detail from my R’lyeh spread from The Call of Cthulhu. Nobody asked permission to use the artwork, I only discovered this release since I get a credit for it on Discogs. So there may well be other releases out there that I haven’t seen yet. If you know of one then leave a comment or send an email.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Shadow Over Atlantis by The Wounded Kings
• Rock shirts
• De Profundis

Of cards and calendars

Ex-calendars.

Last weekend I was preparing to upload a set of new calendar pages to CafePress when I discovered that the wall calendar option I’ve been using there for years is no longer available. In place of the portrait calendar with square artwork pages there’s now a landscape-oriented calendar with artwork pages that are wider than they are tall. This is fine for people wanting to print their photos but it’s useless to anyone whose work is predominantly portrait-oriented. The square page was never ideal but with a little adjustment I could usually tailor a few things to fit the ratio; I also produced the two Alice in Wonderland calendars (above) especially for the square pages.

So that was the end of that. Suggestions from Twitter sent me to Zazzle where I’d forgotten I already had an account, required some years ago when I had to complain to the company about someone selling products featuring my artwork. Zazzle have a better range of calendars but none have square artwork pages. Zazzle does, however, offer more options for page layout than CafePress so after some playing around I’ve found a compromise which allows for square artwork to fit the portrait page (half of which is filled with the days of the month) with some slight overlap from the dates grid. This will be made more apparent when I’ve uploaded everything at the weekend. I may do the same with the older calendars but it’s a lot of work uploading these things, and at the moment I have more important things to do. One consequence of all this turmoil is that if you’ve ever bought one of my CafePress calendars you now have something of a collector’s item since these things are unlikely to be seen again in that form.

Breaks the ice at eldritch parties.

So having set out a stall at Zazzle I can now start selling other things there, something I’m looking forward to since they have a different range of products, and the back-end is a lot better than CafePress. I’ve stuck with the latter since 2001 but their site has always been awkward to use, with things malfunctioning or not working at all. Earlier this year I tried putting playing cards on sale featuring one of my Cthulhu designs; this seemed to work at first, unlike attempts to make similar cards using other artwork, then the shop page vanished for some reason. As a test I’ve done the same thing at Zazzle with immediate success. Expect more announcements along these lines in the near future.

Weekend links 273

Byronic I by Boris Pelcer. Via Full Fathom Five.

• “Music determines everything in terms of our narrative. Music demands, music suggests. Whereas traditional Hollywood animation is all based on character development—you know, there’s Toy Story and it’s Tom Hanks’s voice pushing the thrust of the action. For us, décor is all part of it. It’s the objects, a sense of atmosphere, the stimmung (mood) of what’s happening in this landscape where the puppet is just, invariably, a tiny element.” The Brothers Quay talking to JW McCormack about their films, and about Quay, a short documentary by Christopher Nolan.

• Croissants with Cthulhu: Stephanie Gorton Murphy reports on the Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast at last week’s NecronomiCon. I didn’t attend this: abject silliness is the last thing I want at 8 o’clock in the morning.

• “…a light daze for the rest of the afternoon, detrimental to studying but advantageous for daydreaming.” Italo Calvino on his cinema-going youth.

Only in that brief moment of absolute uncertainty – when both options seem equally plausible and implausible, when neither thought can be accepted or rejected, when everything can be explained and nothing can be explained – only in that moment do we really have this horror of philosophy, this questioning of the principle of sufficient reason. It is for this reason that Todorov qualifies his definition by stating that the “fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty.”

Eugene Thacker in an extract from Tentacles Longer Than Night (Horror of Philosophy, vol. 3), Zero Books, 2015

• It’s always good to hear some new rumblings by Emptyset. The Guardian has a stream of side 1 of the latest release, Signal.

• David Rudkin’s Penda’s Fen receives a film screening at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, on Saturday, 5th September.

• Sea Calls Me Home, another song from the forthcoming Julia Holter album.

• Digital visualizations of imagined future landscapes by Mike Winkelmann.

• Mix of the week: The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. IX by David Colohan.

• Cherchez la femme: Women and Surrealism at Sotheby’s, NYC.

• At It’s Nice That: 50 years of A Humument by Tom Phillips.

• April 16, 1963: Housewife on LSD

• Tentaclii: a Lovecraft blog

• Signal (1981) by Phew | Signals (1983) by Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno | Signals (2010) by The Soundcarriers

Views of Providence

Presenting the best of the architectural shots from the Providence trip. Regular readers will know how much I enjoy an arcade so it was a thrill that the public headquarters of NecronomiCon—Lovecraft Arts & Sciences— was located in the oldest arcade in the United States.

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