Well, hello friends of midnight shadows and all that lurk in those murky corners! It is cover reveal day for THE ART OF DARKNESS: A TREASURY OF THE MORBID, MELANCHOLIC AND MACABRE.
I am so extremely-over-the-moon thrilled with the somber, surreal, multi-layered magnificence of Alex Eckman-Lawn’s cover art–it’s really a dream come true for this artist’s incredible work to be gracing the cover of a book that I’ve written. Aside from the cover art, I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to work with SO MANY DREAM ARTISTS to include in these pages!
So, what else can you expect to find this the pages of this darkly artful tome?
Throughout history, artists have been obsessed with darkness – creating works that haunt and horrify, mesmerize and delight and play on our innermost fears. While these themes might scare us – can’t they also be heartening and beautiful? In exploring and examining these evocative artworks The Art of Darkness offers insight into each artist’s influences and inspirations, asking what comfort can be found in facing our demons? Why are we tempted by fear and the grotesque? And what does this tell us about the human mind?
Of course, sometimes there is no good that can come from the tenebrous sensibilities of darkness and the sickly shivers and sensations they evoke. These are uncomfortable feelings, and we must sit for a while with these shadows – with a book, from the safety of our armchairs.
The Art of Darkness and all of its dreamy, disturbing gloomy glimpses will be released into the world on September 6, 2022! Stay tuned for more details.
For many years now, I have been obsessed with the sublimely ridiculous cover art for ‘Geisterjäger John Sinclair’ (Ghosthunter John Sinclair), a pulpy German horror detective fiction series wherein Sinclair, a Scotland Yard chief inspector, tirelessly battles all kinds of undead and demonic creatures. Apparently, he is the reborn soul of both King Solomon and Knight Templar Hector de Valois. Wow!
These covers feature all manner of bizarre and tawdry evils, from vampire nightclubs to skydiving ghouls to horror discos–and it turns out that the artist responsible for some of my freaky favorites is Catalan painter and illustrator Vicenç Badalona Ballester (1929-2014.) From 1973 until his retirement in 2007, Ballestar produced an incredible number of covers for these books — nearly 1,000!! — and later went into fine art, where via his published books he became a renowned instructor of watercolor techniques.
“Aesthetically speaking, the world that Ballestar created for the duration of his career belonged to the 1970s and early ’80s. His paintings are populated by figures that could have stepped out of an advertisement from the era, if their faces weren’t etched with fear at the horrors they confront. With his broad palette and use of light, Ballestar derived a garish Pop pleasure from sinister darkness in a way previously found only in Roger Corman’s legendary Edgar Allan Poe films starring Vincent Price, where terror joined forces with Technicolor.”
I’ll confess, I have never read a single John Sinclair story. I almost can’t bear to. What if they are not as much fun as the cover art? But when I am feeling down or bummed out, I treat myself to translations to the various synopses for the stories, and their garbled silliness never fails to make me laugh:
“He was a legend of evil. No one knew if he really died or just lost. Most of Kansas residents just wanted to forget about him anyway. But as twelve tourists simply disappeared, he was remembered again. Suddenly fear passed away, and one sentence went round: ‘Sheriff death is back… “
“When Mike Prentiss and Cindy Mallory are just on their way home from the old castle disco, they pass by a closed cemetery.” Mike finally persuades his girlfriend to follow him to enjoy the togetherness there a little more uninterrupted. But for a long time, the silence on the ancient God’s sucker does not last, because suddenly the two of them are attacked with a sharp knife by a spritual woman… “
Anyway, as usual, this post is just an excuse to show off some favorites from an artist whose works I dig. Enjoy!
From the desk of Unquiet Things cohort and sometimes correspondent, the entirely ineffable and ever-ensorcelling Maika!
“A thousand dreams within me softly burn.”
-Arthur Rimbaud
Art has always been nourishing for me. What with the ongoing peri-apocalyptic state of the world, art feels more vital than ever. And while I might not be located anywhere near Chicago, it does my heart, mind, and soul worlds of good to know that artists like sculptor Jessica Joslin and painter Jared Joslin are busy creating beautiful and inspiring works of art.
In fact, they’ve been creating their respective works of art side by side for over a quarter-century. Their new shared exhibit, Dreams Take Flight, is a celebration of “over 25 years of two kindred spirits, working side by side, pursuing their dreams.”
The only thing more inspiring than inspiring works of art are works of art created by artists as they inspired each other.
The opening reception for Dreams Take Flight happens this Friday, November 5, from 6-9pm, at the LivingRoom Gallery 1530 West Superior St. Chicago, Illinois
Show dates: November 5 – November 28.
Hours are 12-5 on Sundays, or by appointment.
Please note that masks AND proof of vaccination are required.
Another horror cheat day! I am still processing some recent things I have watched and read, so while that all simmers on the back burner of my brain’s greasy stove, I thought I’d take you on a tour of some of my horror-related or generally creepy/eerie art! These are probably things I have shared before, but it may be a new sight for new friends and followers (hello to all one or two of you!)
Of course, I hope you’re okay with trio of weirdos accompanying us. These are various Halloween masks I have stolen from my brother-in-law over the years. Except for the cat, which I bought and paid for with my own money during a hurricane when I was meant to be out, procuring supplies.
On a nearby wall is a massive poster of the fabulous Lucy Westenra, by the artist Sara Deck. Honestly, she could recreate every scene in this version of the film and I would poster my whole house with them. Especially this iconic trio!
This is the back wall in my office. It used to appear a bit more finished, but we moved the day bed that was directly underneath this grouping of arts. That means…that …I can continue the arrangement down to the floor, right? Woo hooo!
This is a view just above a small bookcase in my parlor. It’s a spot that could certainly use a bit more fiddling with, but though it’s imperfectly arranged, I really do love these pieces. The eye is from corpsehaus, the ghostly hand (“The Uninvited”) is by David Seidman, and a spooky lady from Jessica Dalva.
Who are some of your favorite illustrators of darkness and artists of the eerie and the macabre?
You may recall that I mentioned early in the month that this year’s version of 31 Days of Horror may be a cheat. So far, I think I’ve done pretty well, but I think I’m calling in a cheat day today because I don’t think I have anything I am quite ready to talk about just yet.
So instead, here is a list of the horror movies I have watched this year. Some of them might be horror-ish, or horror-adjacent, but I’ve kept them all on the list. This is actually from an ongoing Google doc that I continually update throughout the year. Does anyone else do this? I’ve marked the ones that I’d actually recommend to people with asterisks and yes, I did like the really dumb Disturbing Behavior. There’s something about stories that take place on isolated island communities that are just an immediate win for me.
Some definite standouts for me this year were the ghostly eerieness of Lake Mungo, the batshit insanity of Queen of Black Magic, and the quiet, freaky dread of The Wind. And the final .02 seconds of Saint Maude was the most horrifying thing I have ever seen. Noroiand Pulse are two Japanese horror film staples of the early-mid 2000s and I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to watch them. They are both so very deeply unsettling.
Old or new, or new-to-you, what are some of your favorite horror films that you’ve watched this year?
1/27 Perfect Blue (rewatch) *** 2/12 Vivarium 2/14 His House*** (?) Interview with the Vampire (rewatch) (?) Impetigore 3/18 Queen of Black Magic*** 4/2 Noroi*** 4/14 Pulse*** (?) Seance on a Wet Afternoon***
4/19 Unfriended 4/26 Lake Mungo*** (?)Saint Maud 6/24 Sator 7/4 Fear Street *** 7/5 La Llorona (not the Linda Cardellini one)*** 7/10 Fear Street II *** 7/17 Fear Street III*** 7/28 Pandorum 7/29 Slice 7/30 Disturbing Behavior*** (?) When a Stranger Calls 8/8 Scream 3 (rewatch) 8/10 The Binding*** 8/12 Werewolves Within *** (?) Brand New Cherry Flavor***
(?) Los Espookys*** 9/5 The Old Ways*** 9/6 The Wind *** 9/12 Malignant 9/13 Halloween (rewatch) 9/14 Halloween 2 (rewatch) 9/15 Halloween 3 9/18 Halloween 4 (rewatch) 9/24 The Abyss 10/2 Candyman (the new one) *** 10/4-10/7 Midnight Mass *** 10/7 Things Heard and Seen 10/08 Halloween 5 (rewatch) 10/9 Nightmare on Elm Street 3&4 (rewatch) 10/10 Blood Red Sky*** 10/12 Dolls***
10/13 Halloween VI: The Curse of Michael Myers (rewatch)
I’ll be perfectly honest with you. Sometimes these blog posts I share here are entirely fueled by spite. I don’t really have anything to say other than, “hey, you know that thing you posted on your 500K-following creepy art Instagram page? And it got thousands of likes? Even though you didn’t provide the name of the artist or the tiniest amount of information about it? Yeah, well fuck you, you lazy piece of shit.”
Ahem. So. Henri Lievens, people!
A Belgian painter and illustrator of moody, eerie, surrealist works of horror imagery and gothic imagination, Henri Lievens joined the studio of Editions Marabout (a French publishing House that later integrated into Hachette) and produced more than 200 covers, as well as interior illustrations and photographic montages. He was mainly responsible for the cover illustrations of the Marabout Fantastique and Marabout Science-Fiction collections. A list of his works can be found here.
That took like 5 minutes and was cobbled together with data from some French Wiki entries and Italian blogs. These days, a child can do that. So what’s your problem, you stupid Instagram account who will never see this because I am passive-aggressive and I also don’t even remember which account I am mad at anymore?
Anyway, a quick google search will pull up tons of these lurid covers if you are interested in seeing more, but below are a few of my favorites, and where possible, I linked to the actual book if you are interested in that as well.
This interview has been a long time coming! I initially met the Century Guild gang way back in July of 2019 –in a visit to Los Angeles detailed here over at Haute Macabre– when I traveled out west to hang out at that summer’s Oddities Market. Among a teeming throng of dark-hearted weirdos crammed together in a subterranean goth disco chamber (it wasn’t really, but that’s how it looks in my memory!) and an incredibly mind-boggling array of artisans and vendors, I somehow found myself making my way back to the beautiful oasis of the Century Guild booth, adorned and embellished with gorgeous Nouveau and Symbolist works, and which felt like a balm to my senses in the midst of a midnight maelstrom.
We had the loveliest chat, I purchased a gorgeously ominous Syphilis print, and promises were made on my part to feature them in an interview, as I was so absolutely fascinated by what this gallery/museum/archive is doing with the artwork they share through the books and prints they offer.
…and to sum up, two years later, here we are! Better late than never, right? I think so, anyway. See our Q&A below wherein we chat, about the contemporary relevance of 19th-century aesthetics and ideals, becoming more sensitive to the world around us through the myriad feelings that art arouses in us, and the importance of art in our quest for spiritual connection in a universe so vast, ageless, and unknowable.
Who/what is Century Guild and what is your aim? As part of that, your mission references creating “a bridge of understanding between the aesthetics and ideals of the late 19th century and the present.” Can you elaborate on that for those of us who may not be familiar with those aesthetics/ideals, and can you speak to their contemporary relevance?
Century Guild was founded in 1999 as an art gallery specializing in works from 1880-1920, with a focus on Art Nouveau, Symbolist Art and German Expressionism, and over the last 20 years we have expanded into a museum, archive, and publishing company. We began publishing books as a way to share the artworks in our collection with a wider audience and to foster an understanding of how the aesthetics and ideals from that time period are reflected in our society today. For example, every part of the contemporary art world has been influenced by the work of Alphonse Mucha, and we want to show our audience how and why that happened. Art Nouveau was based on the idea that Nature provides a powerful inspiration for aesthetics, and Symbolist and Expressionist Art were based on an idea that I think is well articulated in a quote from The Little Prince, “what is essential is invisible to the eye”. As it relates to these art movements, it’s the idea that suggesting something through dreamlike or nightmarish visuals is more powerful than a perfectly accurate representation.
What draws you to the particular style of art that Century Guild resurrects/represents in terms of Art Nouveau and Symbolist artworks? What is it that you hope people will learn or take away from these works?
For me, the artworks act as a doorway into awareness about ideas larger than the world I inhabit on a daily basis, especially the idea of being connected to Nature and to History: that people a thousand or a hundred years ago felt and thought very much, if not exactly, the same things that we do today. My hope is that by sharing these works we help others walk through that doorway. When people become sensitive to art that reflects an internal landscape, they look at other people and animals and recognize that they experience joy and suffering just as we do, and recognize how important it is to connect with society in a meaningful way.
I love how (in a 2012 interview) you compare the manifesto for the Art Nouveau movement to a treatment for 1999 Wachowski movie The Matrix; I think contemporary cultural examples like that really bring concepts into such sharp relief for people who are just realizing their initial interest in a style of art. I’m curious if, in the ensuing years since you made that comparison, there are any other moments in modern cinema that have the same feel/appeal for you?
That quote is referring to the inception of the Art Nouveau movement- artists at the time were certain that the manifestation of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th century meant that humanity was doomed to be completely disconnected from Nature, all because of something as seemingly innocuous today as a factory that was built on the outskirts of their small town, or something equally marginal when compared to today’s technological overlap. They were limited in the scope of their vision by the time period and had no idea how far it would go. Other modern creations that have the same sort of impact on me have been more forward-looking; the Invisibles graphic novels by Grant Morrison stand out as one example, and I think that the Wachowskis adaptation of Cloud Atlas did the same- they remind us that our understanding of humanity and Nature is even larger than we comprehend, and that we’re constantly on the precipice of some form of larger understanding. Which of course hearkens back to other schools of thought adjacent to the Art Nouveau movement; nothing is new, but just a spiral that moves upward and outward.
You currently work with contemporary artists such as Gail Potocki. What drew you to her work? What do you look for in such collaborations with living artists, or is this an unusual circumstance?
I met Gail back in the days before social media, on a bulletin board called ArtMagick. She would always reply if someone posted a question about Symbolist artists, and when we started chatting we discovered that we lived just a few miles from each other! Gail had mentioned that she was a painter, and when she showed me her work I was floored. Gail was the first artist I had met whose paintings could stand up in the environment created by the fantastic turn of the century artworks in the gallery, in fact, it actually eclipsed everything else in the room! The only other artist who I’ve had that specific experience with is Dave McKean. I love when an artist’s work connects with me in the manner of these earlier movements but takes the ideologies into a modern place. For example, later this year we’re stretching our aesthetic boundaries into more Modern and Folk territories with a book of contemporary art that I’m very excited about, titled Temple of Medusa.
I believe Century Guild’s most recent project/release was Le Pater, a series of mystical illustrations exploring occult themes; images about which the artist, Alphonse Mucha, described to a New York reporter as “the thing I have put my soul into.” This sounds like an incredibly heady viewing experience! Is there anything you might like to share about the project?
(And to backtrack, what is it about the manifesto for the Art Nouveau movement, this connection between art and nature and spirituality, that appeals to you on a personal level? And what is for you, a prime example of this manifesto and connection reflected in a piece of art?)
What appeals to me is the eternal quest of understanding what our larger spiritual universe is and how we fit into it, and a powerful example of this connection is explored in Alphonse Mucha’s Le Pater.
The hardcover that was published in 2019 is a massive tome; I designed it specifically to look like a book you’d see in an archaic library. The book presents Mucha’s Le Pater in its entirety and gives an introduction to mysticism and an overview of magickal ideas in aesthetic form. It examines occult thinking in art from Albrecht Dürer through the Salon de la Rose+Croix, and provides information that allows the reader to decipher the complicated symbolism in Mucha’s Le Pater artworks. Mucha was a devout Mason and student of mystical thinking, and his Le Pater artworks present a very modern, androgynous depiction of God that was celebrated in some quarters and censored in others. The complete artworks in Le Pater were impossible to see outside of museums before we published our book in 2019, so we’re really excited about the Kickstarter project we have going right now to publish the expanded paperback edition. Le Pater is one of the most important artworks of any era, and I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone with an interest in beautiful art or the occult.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: this question was originally posed in the beginning months of the pandemic]
I’m almost afraid to ask this question of anyone right now, considering the global pandemic we’ve all been experiencing, but is there anything coming up that we can look forward to from Century Guild? Any ideas percolating for future releases on the horizon, perhaps, when the world rights itself?
The expanded paperback edition of Le Pater: Alphonse Mucha’s Symbolist Masterpiece and the Lineage of Mysticism is the most important thing that we are doing in 2021- we all agreed that as the world rights itself there is nothing more important we can do as an institution than put artwork and ideas out into the world that foster communication and connectedness. The Century Guild motto is “Think and Read”, which is based on an emblem that Mucha created for the back cover of Le Pater. If people do those two things, the first fervently and the second meaningfully, the world can’t help but be a better place.
