Art Appreciation 103: Lovecraftian Linkage

You know how one link leads to another on the Internet. Well, last week at some point, I found myself directed toward the sites of the two artists below by another artist who thought their work was nicely Lovecraftian. I definitely agree. :-) In fact, I've spent the last few days collecting picture after picture from these two sites and have had a very hard time selecting just a handful of each to share with you.

Up first is Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński, who is clearly channeling both Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith in at least half of the many paintings in his three galleries.

The site is in English but makes extensive use of Flash, so the biggest challenge for me was in figuring out how to copy the pictures; I couldn't just right-click and hit "save." Making matters worse was the fact that the pop-up window that appears when you click on a thumbnail is itself pretty small and doesn't easily resize; yet the pictures it displays should clearly be larger, as you can see by using "zoom in" function.

Fortunately, I was able to uncover the URL for the pop-up window by hitting the "tab" button. Then I copied that link into a new, full-sized tab and got a much larger, nicer image. A bit of fiddling with the screen resolution helped me determine that the best size to make the picture displayer is 1024 x 768 pixels. That's the resolution the site is designed for, and that's the size the pictures themselves look best in. Any larger, and they start to get blurry.



So anyway, for those of you that want to see or save more of Beksinkski's artwork, I suggest opening his site in one tab or window and navigating to the galleries, then clicking here to open a full-sized version of the picture displayer in a new tab or window. You'll see that right now I have the displayer set to the first image in the first gallery. To change images, you can either click the arrows to browse all the pictures in the first gallery one at a time; or if you want to jump to an individual image, go back to the tab/window displaying the whole gallery and click on the thumbnail to bring up a small pop-up window. Then hit the "tab" button to show you the URL for that image, and replace the number at the end of the URL in the picture displayer tab/window with the number of the new pic you want to view. Voila: a new full-sized image.

Trust me, it's a lot less complicated than it sounds. And it's soooo worth it. All those squicky pods and fungi, things made out of bones, darkly mysterious fantasy worlds....Just fantastic.



Today's second featured artist is Jean-Pierre Ugarte, who has figured out how to translate Lovecraft's favorite word, cyclopean, into realistic imagery. His paintings give me the feeling of visiting earth in either the unimaginably distant past or the unimaginably distant future, where giants used the landscape itself as their building blocks, then abandoned their work to slowly crumble back to what it was. Ceilings of mind-staggering height and weight loom over tropical forests, or vast caverns of eerily regular features hint at unknowable depths that were known by someone...once. But what happened to that someone, eh? What happened everyone? I find it all fascinatingly creepy.



Ugarte's site is in French, but don't worry if you can't read the language. On the splash page, click "Oeuvres" to go to his galleries, then either click on a date at the left to see all his works from that year or else select "Peintures" to see only his paintings - which, IMO, are the best things on the site anyway.

Oh, and also IMO, nothing earlier than 1998 is much worth looking at. He really hit his stride in the 00's, and 2006 and 2007 were especially good for him.



EDIT: I've just discovered that Beksiński has a (very sad) Wikipedia entry with several links to more information, including another large gallery that contains images twice as disturbing as the ones on the official site. Some of them reduced me to blunt cursing because there was just no other way to respond.

I can't find any more information about Ugarte.