Thanks to German black metal band Infestus’s latest album E x | I s t, I’ve discovered yet another dark and fucked up artist whose style suits my tastes perfectly. French artist Eric Lacombe’s specialty seems to be horribly disfigured portraits and distorted figures. Whether working with acryllic paint or simple ink and pencil, his figures often feature huge, cavernous holes where eyes and mouths should be, and his rough, fragmented strokes sometimes make his subjects’ faces look burnt beyond recognition, or worse.

The best place to check out Eric’s art is probably his blog Monstror, although he can also be found on DeviantArt and MySpace. He’s also got a smaller blog focused on his music-related art.

Polish artist Andrzej Masianis bears some similarities to other artists I’ve featured recently both stylistically and in terms of subject matter, so I guess it was only a matter of time before I decided to feature him on this site. He came to my attention as a result of some recent cover artwork he did for the Temple of Torturous label’s reissues of Greek ambient black metal act Spectral Lore’s first two albums. While browsing through his portfolio some other paintings looked really familiar, so I’m sure Spectral Lore isn’t the only band that’s utilized his services.

What really made Masianis’s work stand out for me is the extreme detail he puts into his drawings and paintings, giving them a very unique, creepy appearance. Also, many of his drawings and paintings seem to center around themes like the apocalypse, and the way he depicts such scenes of battle with clusters of celestial beings really reminds me of some of Doré’s etchings. Masianis also seems to do a lot of fantasy art as well, with scenes from series like Narnia and The Lord of the Rings popping up frequently.

Unlike a lot of the artists I’ve featured, Masianis has a pretty strong internet presence. Not only does he have an official site, but he’s also on Facebook, MySpace and DeviantArt. Both the official site and his DeviantArt have pretty extensive galleries of his artwork. He has some paintings for sale from his official site, but the store is all in Polish, which makes things a bit difficult for those of us in the US.

Anyone else notice this?

The cover art of Diabolical’s album Ars Vitae…

…looks a lot like the artwork from Orcustus’s debut:

I’m not sure if they took the same source image and colored / retouched it for Diabolical’s album, or if it’s just an eerie coincidence. I definitely like Diabolical’s version better.

By the way, Diabolical’s Ars Vitae officially came out yesterday, so if you’re a fan of Swedish death metal you might want to check that out. It’s sort of a half live album and half new release, featuring four new tracks and nine live tracks, as well as a remastered version of one of their early EPs.

Since I already posted about Cynthia’s Hell survey I should probably give some attention to her actual artwork. Cynthia is the creative force behind ThornyThoughts Artwork, and lately she’s contributed artwork to bands like Urfaust, Self Inflicted Violence, Der Weg Einer Freiheit, Aosoth, and a few others. She’s designed some pretty sweet band logos as well.

Cynthia’s style is easily recognizable - her works are often in simple black & white and seem to be either etched or sometimes drawn with ink. As with Saint John’s work with Inkshadows, this style works perfectly in the context of black metal, so its no surprise that ThornyThoughts has become one of the main providers of artwork for Urfaust’s releases and merchandise. It also helps that Cynthia’s imagination yields some particularly disturbing imagery, both beutiful and morbid at the same time.

Cynthia was nice enough to provide a little insight into what inspires her and her artwork (and name-drop some excellent bands, a few of which I’d never heard of):

A great source of inspiration is probably failure and the chaos in my head. It’s a mistake to give everyone else the fault for things going wrong. In reality you should work on your own mistakes as well. So what I’m doing is (as long as it’s a personal work) a kind of self reflection or a trial to ‘ban’ the horrors and endless questions of every day life onto a medium, maybe kind of a self-therapy. It’s processing negativity by turning it into productivity through ‘art’.

Of course I find inspiration in music, art, graphic novels, books, films, conversation and dreams. As long as it moves and touches me, gives birth to feelings and visuals inside me, I’m happy with any genre.

If you need ‘proper’ examples: the islandic/swedish BM Band Skendöd inspired me with the album Vanskapt as it meant a real musical ‘illustration’ of a dark time in my life. Listening to it and feeling understood was largely satisfying to me and inspired me to do something similar - processing and banning my personal abyss onto a medium like I explained above. I admire people who have the gift to illustrate a whole train of thoughts and feelings with its ups and downs. Other examples in music I admire are Ikuinen Kaamos: The Forlorn, Self Inflicted Violence: A Perception Of Matter And Energy, Slumber: Fallout, Skogen: Vittra, Totalselfhatred s/t …and many more in other genres.

In art I admire since I was a little kid Hieronymos Bosch, Käthe Kollwitz and Zdzislaw Beksinski and Enki Bilal.

ThornyThoughts currently doesn’t have an online store, but you can buy original etching prints of her work by contacting Cynthia. She also mentioned that Viva Hate Records will be releasing poster prints of her work for Der Weg Einer Freiheit, with each personally signed by Cynthia.

If you’re interested in her work, check out the ThornyThoughts page on MySpace for several galleries of her prints, shirt, album and logo designs!

This is pretty cool for those of you who might be artistically-inclined…

Now that Peaceville owns the rights to Darkthrone’s Moonfog releases, the label is gearing up to reissue the newly acquired Darkthrone titles, and Fenriz and Nocturno Culto have decided to hold a competition to create new cover artwork to adorn the updated versions of Ravishing Grimness and Goatlord. I’ve never really liked the Goatloard cover art, so hopefully whatever the fans come up with will be a big improvement.

The competition will run through January 31st and submissions should be sent to Peaceville.

If interested, check out the Official Contest Rules.

Even if you’re not interested, it’s kind of funny to read the rules, which are totally Darkthronish in nature and tone, and amusingly non-committal: “Only serious contributions will reach Fenriz and me to decide upon.” “This is not a real competition. There are no prizes.” It doesn’t sound like the band is particularly optimistic that they’ll receive something awesome, but hopefully the fans will prove them wrong.

I’m always happy to pollute survey results with my fucked up opinions, but today I happened on a questionnaire that is pretty interesting in and of itself. It belongs to Cynthia from ThornyThoughts, who has done artwork and shirt designs for Urfaust and several other black metal bands. When not cranking out ridiculously awesome art, shes working on a degree at Fachhochschule Niederrhein (no idea) in Germany, and needs your help for her diploma project!

Her project is focused on Sartre’s quote “L’enfer c’est les autres” (”Hell is other people”), and shes soliciting people’s opinions on the concept of hell, the afterlife and other related topics. In her own words:

The title might be L’ENFER C’EST LES AUTRES (Hell is other people) which is a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit which is about three people finding themselves in hell in form of a windowless hotel room being each other’s personal hell. I will use this as an example in literature and am looking for more inspiration and YOUR thoughts.
The idea of hell developed since human intelligence reached the point of a belief in a life after death and invented morals or rules - once broken eternal punishment is the consequence. The fear of the unknown fed the most cruel visions of hell. Different culture and religions define different versions of right and wrong and naturally expect other, opinions’ to be punished. Nowadays, when people are not really separated geographically anymore, those different individual ideals lead to severe clashes. So hell can be here and now. If you’re not your own personal hell - it’s other people.

The survey itself doesn’t take too long and the questions are all very interesting, and I’m sure that all the readers of this site will have some pretty colorful responses:

» Take the Hell Survey!

You can check out ThornyThoughts’s profile and artwork on ThornyThought’s MySpace page and get a little more info about the project in this blog post.

By now you may have heard about Svartediket, the black metal musical that came out earlier this year in Norway (check out Blabbermouth’s coverage of it here). It concerns the river in Norway of the same name, which has a gruesome history of death and sickness going all the way back to the days of the Black plague. Ex-Gorgoroth vocalist Gaahl has announced his participation, to the amusement of some black metal fans.

Among all the discussions about Gaahl and about the idea of a black metal musical in general, one thing that seems to be getting somewhat overlooked is the music itself, which comes from Norwegian black metal band Svartediket’s self-titled concept album. Admittedly its pretty bizarre, full of things like operatic female vocals and violins, but it’s also pretty well-composed and certainly makes for an interesting listen. If you’re a fan of unusual black metal, you should definitely check them out. Svartediket’s MySpace page and Amazon MP3 have a few samples.

Here’s a teaser for the Svartediket album:

And here’s a promo video for the musical itself:

19th century Belgian artist Félicien Rops worked with a variety of different techniques, but he’s rather unusual in that he is most well-known for his drawings rather than his paintings. His work tends to be very symbolic and often contains erotic and Satanic images, which is likely why some black metal bands like Conspiracy and Ayat have begun utilizing his artwork on covers of their recent albums. Women are also very frequent subjects of his works, although his paintings tend to focus more on depicting landscapes.

Rops was strongly influenced by Charles Baudelaire, and through his relationship with Baudelaire he also became associated with several other literary figures as well as the Symbolism and Decadence literary movements.

Belgium’s Rops Museum, located in Namur near the artist’s birthplace, has a great website discussing Rops’s various techniques and displaying both his works and some interpretations of what they represent. ArtInThePicture.com also has some info and a gallery of Rops’s work.

Polish painter Zdzislaw Beksinski is an artist whose name I ran across in the links section of some other artist’s page, and at the time I didn’t think he had any relation to metal whatsoever, other than perhaps as a visual inspiration. His work is so unbelievably cool and so completely metal that I kept coming back to it. After finding some more information about him I learned that Beksinski’s paintings actually have been used by several bands, including Nightbringer, Leviathan and Blood of Kingu. His unique visual style has also probably served as inspiration for numerous other bands and artists in the genre.

Beksinski was quite prolific and moved through numerous styles over the course of his life. He is perhaps best known (certainly in the metal world) for his output during his “fantastic period,” which lasted from the 1960s through the 1980s and saw Beksinski producing paintings featuring dark, disturbing and surrealistic imagery. His art depicts alien landscapes, strange decaying textures, and mysterious hooded or skeletal figures. The disturbing, otherworldly nature and skeletal elements of his work often causes Beksinksi to be compared with H.R. Giger. Beksinski himself said of his painting during this period that he wished to paint “in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams”.

Unfortunately, Beksinksi was tragically murdered in 2005 over what sounds like a petty disagreement with a teenage aquaintance. In his later years he had shifted to a sparser, more abstract style and also experimented with digital art and photography manipulation.

Beksinski fortunately has several websites dedicated to his work. His (extremely well-done!) official site is located at http://www.beksinski.pl/, and is one of the only sites I’ve been to where the embedded music is actually a good thing.

There is also an extensive gallery of his work at the Dmochowski Gallery site, especially useful if you get tired of the flash browsing on the official site.

You can also buy Beksinski limited edition art prints from The Belvedere Gallery. At $395.00 each they are kind of expensive, but having a Beksinski print in your house seems worth the money to me!

Finally you can buy a few cheaper prints as well as some books on Beksinski from Amazon.com. The Fantastic Art of Beksinski seems to be a good representation of his work.

It’s been awhile since I’ve featured an artist, but this one should be worth the wait. A friend of mine turned me on to the work of American photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, whose artwork is not something you forget once you’ve seen it. Witkin is generally known for using people with various physical deformities or abnormalities in his photography, as well as corpses and other body parts. He apparently travelled to Mexico in order to more freely have access to corpses and such, because obviously that sort of thing is frowned upon here in the states.

Witkin’s final works are an astounding combination of beauty and perversion. Aside from the striking imagery and subject matter, many of his photographs are highly symbolic, often recalling religious scenes or classical paintings. Witkin also frequently scratches, pierces or otherwise damages the negatives in order to give the final image a distinct, old-fashioned look.

Witkin’s work has not escaped the eye of the metal community. One of his more famous photographs, “The Kiss,” which depicts two halves of a severed head kissing each other, was used as the cover art for Pungent Stench’s Been Caught Buttering album. His Man Without a Head photograph was also used as an album cover, although I can’t seem to remember who. Any of you deathgrind fans out there know which band that was?

Witkin doesn’t have a website but he has published several books of his work. Here are a few to check out:

• Witkin (1995) - a great hardcover containing a huge number of Witkin’s photos
• Joel-Peter Witkin (photofile) (2008) - a paperback with 64 of Witkin’s photos
• Joel-Peter Witkin (2007) - a great introduction to Witkin’s work