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.

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.