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.

I’ve run across several Flickr accounts belonging to various bands and musicians while looking up extreme music artwork (Niklas Sundin’s, for instance), but Erik K. Skodvin’s photos are easily some of the most interesting. Skodvin is the man behind creepy experimental/ambient act Svarte Greiner, he’s one of the two members of Deaf Center, and he also runs the Miasmah label.

In addition to his musical pursuits, Skodvin also handles all the artwork for Svarte Greiner, and has also done graphics for several other Miasmah releases. Part of what makes Svarte Greiner’s music so effective is the disturbing artwork that accompanies it, and Skodvin’s talent at finding and capturing stark, haunting images is evident in his photography. His account contains plenty of photos of normal stuff like friends, live performances and travel pictures, but there are some beautifully eerie photos mixed in too.

Skodvin also has a lot of his artwork for Svarte Greiner and other things up in various sets as well, and those are great to check out. The set for Svarte Greiner’s most recent release “Kappe” contains some images that didn’t make their way into the final release (or at least the CD release) so it’s interesting to see some of the images that didn’t make the final cut.

If you browse his contacts, you can also find the accounts of several other Type / Miasmah artists like Xela, Peter Broderick and Grouper.

Jeff Lowe’s art often depicts twisted, deformed figures and strange, alien landscapes. A lot of the things in his drawings and paintings look like they are composed of flesh, guts, brains or other organic materials. Very bizarre stuff.

Given how weird some of Lowe’s work is, you’d think his work would be a perfect fit for metal. The cover art he created for Portal’s “Outre” perfectly suits the band’s chaotic and disorienting style of death metal.

Jeff Lowe’s official site has extensive galleries of his drawings and paintings, as well as a small shop where you can buy a few posters or a book of his artwork. He also has a page on the beinArt Surreal Art Collective (which is full of weird and disturbing art and definitely worth a look).

Theodor Kittelsen was a Norwegian artist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is known mainly for his illustrations of trolls and other fictional creatures, although he published several books of drawings and illustrations over the course of his life.

His book Svartedauen, which depicted the Black Death running its course through Norway, should be of particular interest to metal fans. The sparse, black and white illustrations often use a hideous old woman or flocks of birds to symbolize the plague’s path. Burzum has used several of Kittelsen’s illustrations for album covers and liner notes, including many taken from Svartedauen.

Aside from his sometimes dark subject matter, Kittlesen’s passion for the natural world and his homeland of Norway aligns well with many bands of today. He wrote:

“Most of all I am fascinated by mystery, fabulousness and majesty of our nature. If I do not combine my work with careful observation of nature, then, I am afraid my senses will involuntary be stupefied.”

For more details about Kittlesen’s life as well as an extensive gallery of his work, check out Kittelsen.ru. They have several high-quality scans from the Svartedauen book here. This Kittelsen site also has a very extensive gallery of his work.

American artist Matthew Woodson is another artist with a pretty impressive list of clients. He’s provided illustrations for several well-known publications and companies such as American Express, Penthouse, Wired, ESPN, and New York Magazine, among many others. He’s featured here because of his extensive work with UK experimental music label Type Records, having provided album artwork for artists like Xela, and Helios.

Woodson has a unique and very recognizable style. For the majority of his illustrations he starts with a hand-drawn pen & ink sketch and then uses Photoshop to paint and color different sections, provide further texture, and tweak the final appearance. The highly realistic images and sometimes surreal subject matter rendered with strong pen-lines and discontinuous colors and shading definitely give Woodson’s works a unique look. His illustrations also often also give the impression of capturing fleeting moments in time, with subjects sometimes in mid-motion or partially cut-off by the frame.

Woodson’s website at Ghostco.org contains a fairly extensive gallery of his illustrations, as well as handful of prints for sale. He also maintains a blog where he occasionally discusses techniques, inspirations, and random other aspects of his life. Check here and here for a few posts in which he describes some of the intermediate steps involved in creating his illustrations, giving some interesting insight into his artistic style and creative process.

Raymond Swanland is a fairly accomplished artist in the fantasy / science fiction space, being perhaps best known for his illustrations for the Oddworld video game series. He’s apparently only done a handful of metal CD covers so far, but the few he has done are pretty awesome. The covers for Psycroptic’s “Ob(Servant)” and Deeds of Flesh’s “Crown of Souls” and “Of What’s To Come” are among his recent creations.

Swanland’s website has a really interesting Q + A section which describes some of Swanland’s techniques. Apparently he started out painting with acrylics on canvas, but nowadays he makes extensive use of Photoshop and a graphic tablet, which seems to be what a lot of today’s metal artists are doing.

He also goes into some detail about how he constructs an image, starting with a sketch, moving the main elements into Photoshop layers, and finally applying details. It was interesting going back to the gallery after reading about his process - things like his use of the darkest base for the foreground images to accentuate the subject of his paintings are really evident in the final works.

RaymondSwanland.com has an extensive gallery with a bunch of his work, but not too much of his metal-related stuff is in there, unfortunately. He doesn’t currently have any paintings for sale but he plans to in the near future, and is taking suggestions for which ones to offer first. So if you see some paintings that you like, let him know!

Originally when I planned to feature notable artists from the metal scene on this site, I had a short list of prominent names (Dave McKean, Dan Seagrave, Travis Smith, Wes Benscoter, etc.) and I was actually worried that I’d run out pretty quickly. Instead, I’ve been discovering new artists faster than I’ve been able to post about them, and have been generally amazed at how many talented artists and designers are out there contributing to the scene.

The subject of this post is Belgian artist Christophe Szpajdel, an artist whose name may not be as recognizable as the artists mentioned above, but whose body of work is at least as pervasive in metal as any of them. Szpajdel has designed over 7,000 band logos, including the iconic logos of Emperor, Enthroned, Nargaroth, Tsjuder, Horna, Moonspell and Nachtmystium. A forestry engineer by trade, Szpajdel draws inspiration from landscapes, forests and other aspects of nature. He also is influenced by different styles of architecture he encounters while travelling, and he has lately begun exploring different directions such as Art Deco and Art Nouveau.

Various interviews with Szpajdel over the years have revealed him to be a fascinating and complex person whose passion for underground metal is matched only by his enthusiasm for his profession. He speaks eight languages, has traveled the world performing research, and possesses almost encyclopedic knowledge about regional metal scenes and bands.

It’s interesting that Szpajdel has admitted that he has, at least in the past, preferred not to receive direct monetary compensation for his logos. Instead, he requests several copies of the bands’ CDs so that he can both make some money and promote the band. His commitment to the scene is also evident in his method of choosing which bands to design logos for - he compiles information about the band and makes a decision based on the level of dedication the band displays to their music.

You can read more about Christophe Szpajdel in this excellent 2002 interview by Maelstrom Magazine, as well as this interview in Vice Magazine. You can also find Szpajdel on MySpace and Flickr.