A
Anonymous
Guest
While I was at University, I first met R_______.
To paraphrase Frost, R_______ was 'one acquainted with the night'. I once was his anatomical reference for a picture.
Imagine:-
POV high in the vaults of a Cathedral, a summer evening after the last service of the day has broken up.
The last few can be seen wending their way out of the great door and the sun casts its last, lazy beams of light through the great west window. The vaulted roof is already in shadow and each vault has matching Grotesques facing each other. Birds, as they do flit around in the roof as they do in such great old buildings. All is well.
Except for the fourth one on the right.
It's already unpleasant face is contorted in unholy glee, unlike its brothers vacuous hideousness, and in its gnarled claw it holds a struggling bird...
My description doesn't do it justice, but you get the idea...
I think Lovecraft, in the tale 'Pickman's Model', said it best...
"...Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a
nightmare or a Witches' Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great
painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only
a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of
fear- the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent
instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts
and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness....
...Their art was the art that convinced- when we saw the pictures we saw the
demons themselves and were afraid of them. And the queer part was, that
Pickman got none of his power from the use of selectiveness or bizarrerie.
Nothing was blurred, distorted, or conventionalized; outlines were sharp and
lifelike, and details were almost painfully defined. And the faces!
It was not any mere artist's interpretation that we saw; it was pandemonium
itself, crystal clear in stark objectivity. That was it, by Heaven! The man
was not a fantaisiste or romanticist at all- he did not even try to give us
the churning, prismatic ephemera of dreams, but coldly and sardonically
reflected some stable, mechanistic, and well-established horror- world which
he saw fully, brilliantly, squarely, and unfalteringly. God knows what that
world can have been, or where he ever glimpsed the blasphemous shapes that
loped and trotted and crawled through it; but whatever the baffling source
of his images, one thing was plain. Pickman was in every sense- in
conception and in execution- a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific
realist....
...Either he was born in strange shadow, or he'd found a way to unlock the
forbidden gate. It's all the same now, for he's gone- back into the fabulous
darkness he loved to haunt... "
He may have been wrting about R______. Last I heard, he was confined and never likely to to come back. R______ would have liked the irony of the above quote.
He made me the statue shown in the attached picture. It gives an idea of his capabilities as an Artist. (Disregard the Animanics Bookend. If holds up part of my collection of weird fiction
)
To paraphrase Frost, R_______ was 'one acquainted with the night'. I once was his anatomical reference for a picture.
Imagine:-
POV high in the vaults of a Cathedral, a summer evening after the last service of the day has broken up.
The last few can be seen wending their way out of the great door and the sun casts its last, lazy beams of light through the great west window. The vaulted roof is already in shadow and each vault has matching Grotesques facing each other. Birds, as they do flit around in the roof as they do in such great old buildings. All is well.
Except for the fourth one on the right.
It's already unpleasant face is contorted in unholy glee, unlike its brothers vacuous hideousness, and in its gnarled claw it holds a struggling bird...
My description doesn't do it justice, but you get the idea...
I think Lovecraft, in the tale 'Pickman's Model', said it best...
"...Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a
nightmare or a Witches' Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great
painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only
a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of
fear- the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent
instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts
and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness....
...Their art was the art that convinced- when we saw the pictures we saw the
demons themselves and were afraid of them. And the queer part was, that
Pickman got none of his power from the use of selectiveness or bizarrerie.
Nothing was blurred, distorted, or conventionalized; outlines were sharp and
lifelike, and details were almost painfully defined. And the faces!
It was not any mere artist's interpretation that we saw; it was pandemonium
itself, crystal clear in stark objectivity. That was it, by Heaven! The man
was not a fantaisiste or romanticist at all- he did not even try to give us
the churning, prismatic ephemera of dreams, but coldly and sardonically
reflected some stable, mechanistic, and well-established horror- world which
he saw fully, brilliantly, squarely, and unfalteringly. God knows what that
world can have been, or where he ever glimpsed the blasphemous shapes that
loped and trotted and crawled through it; but whatever the baffling source
of his images, one thing was plain. Pickman was in every sense- in
conception and in execution- a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific
realist....
...Either he was born in strange shadow, or he'd found a way to unlock the
forbidden gate. It's all the same now, for he's gone- back into the fabulous
darkness he loved to haunt... "
He may have been wrting about R______. Last I heard, he was confined and never likely to to come back. R______ would have liked the irony of the above quote.
He made me the statue shown in the attached picture. It gives an idea of his capabilities as an Artist. (Disregard the Animanics Bookend. If holds up part of my collection of weird fiction
)