The selection will continue to grow. Most of my work is done on 9 X 11 inch Bristol paper mainly due to my scanner size so doing huge reproductions of my work would lose in quality. But the 11 X 14 poster sizes offered at zazzle.com give me room to work in a border and still retain the size of the original.
As I mentioned before I will add more as time goes on, I intend to order these myself to inspect their quality.
As an artist I think it is also important to promote others' work. Since I started my account on Deviant Art I have been impressed by the community of very talented people that congregate there. Some of even inspired me such as CopperAge with his use of tonal work and pencils. The piece below is excellent combination of steampunk and Lovecraftian horror that he conjured for the Steampunk World Fair held in New Jersey. The Hand of Glory Contraption is deviously inventive and imaginative.
What is even more impressive is that CopperAge does an online comic entitled "It's a Circle-Hopeless in Main." Beautifully rendered and often with title pages that have borders that accentuate the page, this web comic is highly unique and very well crafted. Having attempted an online comic before I can tell you that it is a huge sacrifice to commit your time and talent to construct and sometimes the payoff is non existent. Fortunately CopperAge has the drive and imitative to commit to such a project, that alone is enough for recognition.
Heavy on Lovecraftian influences as well as beautiful art, I highly recommend it.
I discovered H.P. Lovecraft in my early teens when Ballentine Books began publishing a fantasy line reintroducing to the public works from authors like George MacDonald, E.R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake, Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith and yes, even J.R.R. Tolkien among others. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series was the vision of Betty Ballantine and her husband Ian. Lin Carter took on the role of editor and was also later responsible for editing Robert E. Howard's Conan series for Lancer Books. If it weren't for Betty Ballentine and Lin Carter, many fine works of high fantasy would remain in obscurity.
I remember seeing my first Lovecraft book in the local drug store in the paperback book rack. The cover was an eye catching oddity by surrealist Gervasio Gallardo and I was immediately intrigued and became a Lovecraft fan ever since. There was something about his world filled with unseen alien dread and elder gods that lay dreaming on the edge of reality that fired my imagination and kept me lying awake at night staring at the ceiling wondering what cosmic horrors lay behind the stars.
I was quick to recognize even then that Lovecraft channeled Poe in much of his prose and that made me admire him even more. Lovecraft went a step further and created a mythos that still inspires horror authors today like Clive Barker and even Stephen King admitted that Lovecraft was the greatest horror writer of the 20th Century. This inspiration was given recognition by several authors and film directors in a recent documentary called Lovecraft Fear of the Unknown. The documentary supports a full cast of heavyweights that include Neil Gaiman, Peter Straub, Ramsey Cambell and directors John Carpenter, Stuart Gordon and Guillermo Del Toro. Each discuss not only their inspirations from Lovecraft but also his neurotic sensibilities and the contridictions that made up his life. For instance it has become common knowledge that Lovecraft was xenophobic yet he married Sonia Greene, a woman with Jewish heritage who was very independent for a lady of that time period. Their nine year marriage ended in an amiable divorce that Lovecraft never finalized.
If you are a fan of Lovecraft and have an interested in his somewhat neurotic and complex life as well as his influence on modern horror, then is a must see.
For a bibliography of the Ballentine Adult Fantasy line as well a collection of photos of the covers check Phantasma.net
Seems that Poe continues to pop up in the news. Already there are two movies with Poe as a character in the works as well as a television series, Poe seems to be everywhere. All the more reason to support a petition that is being circulated on the net. It seems that the City of Baltimore will cease funding for Poe's house and museum and will close it in 2012. Here is the link to the petition
Grim Machinations
Recently finished this piece, Grim Machinations. Postcards and photo prints are available at deviant art and post cards as well as T-shirts at zazzle.
Two new films featuring Poe are now in post production. One with John Cusack as Poe in a fictionalized version of Poe's last days as he is in pursuit of a serial killer that is murdering in a fashion that mirrors Poe's stories entitled The Raven.
The other is entitled Twixt Now and Sunrise and is directed by Francis Ford Coppola and stars Ben Chapman as Poe. Coppola stated that the genesis of the film began with a nightmare, "But as I was having it I realized perhaps it was a gift, as I could make it as a story, perhaps a scary film, I thought even as I was dreaming. But then some loud noise outside woke me up, and I wanted to go back to the dream and get an ending. But I couldn't fall back asleep so I recorded what I remembered right there and then on my phone. I realized that it was a gothic romance setting, so in fact I'd be able to do it all around my home base, rather than have to go to a distant country." No plot or summary has been released yet but the cast will also include Val Kilmer.
The Church of Bones
Below is an interactive 3D tour of the Sedlec Ossuary also known as the Church of Bones located in the Czech Republic. In 1870, FrantiĊĦek Rint, a woodcarver, was employed by the Schwarzenberg family to put the bone heaps of somewhere between 40,000 to 70,000 people into order. Below are examples of the results.
Below is a video of the Chruch of Bones with haunting music
Magnus Somnus
I have recently finished this piece and then decided to add some gray scale tones via Photoshop. Ever since I read the first two books of Anne Rice's Vampire series (I stopped after Queen of the Damned) I was always intrigued by the fact that sometimes Vampires would bury themselves for long periods, even centuries. This was purely for fun and perhaps a bit of Gorey inspired vision of a vampire locking himself away in his coffin for "the big sleep".
