Category — Art

I thought my eyes were wrung out and weary of smooth, digital illustration but perhaps I was only irritated that so much of it fixates on happy-puppy subject matter. Check out these pieces by Etsy.com artist Goobeetsa. The Medusa is my favorite of the “Spooky” portraits but my heart truly belongs to the Dracula paper puppets. Hours of fun on a rainy afternoon, I tell ya. And reasonably priced.

Dracula puppets by Etsy.com artist Goobeetsa

These lovingly hand-painted resin figurines are based on the nightmarish characters that populate the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch (1450 - 1516) (Hieronymous Bosch on wikipedia)

They’re sort of like action figures for grown up kids who are just a bit artsy and just a bit twisted. Incidentally you can buy these figurines and MANY others at talariaenterprises.com

I’m really torn amongst several reactions: I’m confused, a bit disgusted, more than a bit intrigued and delighted and part of me just wants a whole SHELF of these weird little dust-catchers. How does it make you feel to see bits of “high culture” — especially pretty STRANGE and obscure culture — mass manufactured into easily consumable bits? How many of these things do YOU want? Which ones?

Everyday for a whole year, a different skull appears on this wonderfully creative blog. Some are pieces of jewelry, some are actual skulls, some are pieces of origami, one was a computer typeface, another was a desktop pattern… you get the idea. All over the map in their media and let’s be frank, the quality of their execution but every post is a skull of some sort or another. It’s all free; it’s all fun. It’s likely the kind of thing that would appeal to someone who likes to read about nightmares and fear. The site has spawned a legion of similar projects but Skull-a-Day, as far as I can tell, was nearly the first.

Given my love of weird papercraft, one of my favorite entries is this one for a papercraft skull complete with an articulated jaw.

There are cool limited edition t-shirt to support the site, ones with the logo “Nevermore” and a bird (my guess is that it’s a raven) and, you guessed it, a skull.

If you know comics, you likely associate the name Jack Kirby with super heroes but Monsterblog has taken its solemn duty to keep alive Kirby’s contribution to MONSTER comics. Yup. This site has sample scans from a whole slew of Kirby’s creatures with nary a spandex costume to be found among the pages. It’s an elegantly structured site and it’s great fun to browse.

http://monsterblog.oneroom.org/

What predicament has poor Peculia found herself in now? The continuing exploits of Peculia were the back up feature in Richard Sala’s “Evil Eye” comic and now are available all together in a creepy-hot collection. Sala’s work is almost exclusively black and white and frankly the examples of his full color work are much less effective than the stark images and textures he conjures from black ink and white paper.

The storylines of a typical Sala comic exhibit the same kind of snaking dream logic of troubled sleep, where one bad situation leads to another bad situation according to some kind of strange rationality. And also like a dream, the conclusions are sometimes weird yet poetically fitting. Their overall feel has been described as “Gothic humor” but the mixture of high-drama elements, like girl-pirates, mad scientists and masked figures retains a matter-of-fact presentation, never slipping into cheap camp.

A brief bibliography would include:

• The Grave Robber’s Daughter

• The Chuckling Whatsit

• Peculia and the Groon Grove Vampires

• Peculia

• Big Book of Horror

• Mad Night, Featuring Judy Drood, Girl Detective

• Maniac Killer Strikes Again!: Delirious, Mysterious Stories

• The Ghastly Ones & Other Fiendish Frolics: A Gallery of Gruesome Creeps

• Little Book Of Horror: Dracula (Little Book of Horror)

• Evil eye

• Black Cat Crossing

• Hypnotic Tales

• Delphine #2 (”Ignatz” Collection, Volume 20)

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I picked up these hand-drawn match books at an “Alternative Art Fair” a couple months ago in Ypsilanti, MI and ever since then I have regretted that I didn’t buy more. Each matchbook features a different, hand drawn “Smokin’ Zombie.”  They’re the work of the artist Sean Bieri who has a blog over here at:   The Man Who Japed.  He does LOTS of cool stuff and is a member of HATCH, a collective of artists in Hamtramck that also does lots of cool stuff that I’d like to plug but to be honest the zombie matchbooks are the only things that are really nightmare-related. The HATCH table is one that I ALWAYS hit at the Alternative Art Fair.
I’m no longer a smoker but I’ve got lots of friends who are and I think these little gems would make great things to sort of slip in their coat pockets… if I had just bought them by the HANDFUL.