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.

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!

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

Finally a metal band woke up and used a painting from one of my favorite artists, Francis Bacon. Seriously, how can an artist who did a series of paintings of popes screaming in agony not have his art used in some fashion by the underground metal scene?

Francis Bacon was a highly successful Irish figurative painter in the 20th century. His artwork is known for its abtract, distorted figures and tortured imagery. He painted a series of works depicting screaming Papal heads or torsos, and other themes included crucifixions and grotesque self portraits or portraits of friends. H.R. Geiger has stated that Bacon’s work was a strong inspirational force behind his creations for the film Alien.

Anyway, the winner (unless there are other bands using Bacon’s work that I’m not aware of) is Prosanctus Inferi, a death metal band who will be releasing their first album Pandemonic Ululations of Vesperic Palpitation later this year. Their album cover uses a portion of Bacon’s Head I painting. Check out the cover art below.

You can learn more about Francis Bacon on Wikipedia, and check out a couple galleries containing some of his work here and here.

Saint John is the man behind Inkshadows, which has provided album art for black metal bands like Svartsyn, Arckanum and End. His style of simple pen & ink, black and white illustrations is easily recognizable, and like many artists who use similar techniques, the rawness and roughness of his work makes it perfect for metal music. Many of Arckanum’s recent album covers, such as those for ÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞ, Grimalkinz Skaldi and splits with Svartsyn and Sataros Grief were all Inkshadows creations.

Aside from his album cover work, he’s also done numerous illustrations for various books and magazines. While his other illustrations are pretty decent, there’s a certain ‘ugliness’ that he imparts on many of his metal-related creations that I think really set them apart and give them a uniquely dark feel. His recent work with Arckanum and End is probably the best example of what I’m talking about.

The Inkshadows website seems to be down at the moment, but you can get in touch with Saint John and see some examples of his work on the Inkshadows MySpace page.

Robert Høyem is a Norwegian artist whose design company, At The Ends of The Earth Designs, has done illustration and design for numerous metal bands. Some of his clients include Shining, Drautran, Iskald, Galar, Agua de Annique, Den Saakaldte, and Reverend Bizarre.

Høyem’s style varies quite a bit; he apparently uses several different techniques and is very flexible. Some of his work, such as the cover paintings created for Elite and Iskald, is pretty similar to the style of Travis Smith and similar artists, featuring various elements blurred in and out of one another and great use of color. Other pieces, such as his covers for Galar and Drautran, are more landscape-oriented and minimal. He also has some works that are mostly photorealistic with some additional noise and effects added.

You can see a great deal of Høyem’s work at his website, AtTheEnds.com. Be sure to check out the section of unused artwork, which might come in handy if you’re looking for album cover art in a hurry.

Mark Riddick is one of the better known and certainly one of the more prolific artists in the world of extreme metal. He’s been providing illustrations for the metal community for almost 20 years, and his work can be seen on album covers, merchandsise, and in various metal publications.

Riddick’s uses a rough, often black-and-white pen and ink style, which gives his artwork a very old-school, underground quality. Corpses, zombies, demons and other similar creatures are frequent subjects of Riddick’s illustrations. Probably the most prominent example of Riddick’s style is his recent work for Arsis; Riddick designed pretty much all of the band’s recent cover art and merchandise. In addition to Arsis, he’s worked with numerous other extreme metal bands, including Devourment, Beneath The Massacre, Kataklysm, Dying Fetus, The Black Dahlia Murder, Hypocrisy, Internal Bleeding and Psycroptic.

Riddick has published a few art books that are worth a look. “Killustration” and the more recent “Rotten Renderings” feature large collections of his illustrations. Both books include much of Riddick’s work for various extreme metal bands, as well as unreleased work and other illustrations. Riddick also compiled and annotated “Logos From Hell,” a book featuring many of metal’s most influential band logos. In addition to Riddick, the book includes logos by Chris Moyen, Christophe Szpajdel, Kris Verwimp, JonZig and many others.

Check out Mark Riddick’s website RiddickArt.com for a gallery of his work, some cool wallpapers and an extensive store featuring books, t-shirts, posters, CDs and other good stuff.

Mark also has a twin brother Mike Riddick who is equally active in the music scene. The brothers work together through RiddickBros.com to provide professional design services for music media. Mike also created MetalHit.com, a pioneering digital extreme music label, and operates The Fossil Dungeon, a record label specializing in ethereal and gothic artists.