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Ghouls, H.P. Lovecraft & beyond the beyond: The deeply creepy creations of artist John Holmes
05.17.2018
10:49 am
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A painting by British artist John Holmes.
 
From the time he held his first solo art exhibition in 1961, the art of British painter and illustrator John Holmes has expanded the minds of his fans with his imaginative take on monsters and other makers of mayhem. After hustling his craft hard in the early 60s, a few years later Holmes found himself busy working almost non-stop creating artwork for all kinds of publications including Playboy and UK women’s magazine, Nova. Later, Holmes would hook up with the art director for British publishing company Granada Books, and his ghoulish illustrations would be used widely on titles from authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Pynchon and perhaps most famously on the cover of the 1970 edition of Germaine Greer’s book, The Female Eunuch. Holmes’ floating female torso for Greer’s book was preceded by his disquieting work featured on the album cover, gatefold and back of Ceremony: An Electronic Mass—the collaboration of prog rock band Spooky Tooth and French electro-producer Pierre Henry .

Initially, Holmes’ work was much more abstract—a stark contrast to his strangely realistic work which would make him famous. His art was also widely used for the popular series The Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories—and if you were a child of the late 60s, 70s or even the early 80s, I’m sure you will recognize at least one of Holmes’ eerie, minimalistic paintings in this post. Much of what follows is NSFW.
 

Holmes’ artwork which appeared on the cover of an edition of H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Tomb (and other stories).’
 

The cover of Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow.’
 

Holmes’ cover for the 1973 book by Poul Anderson, ‘Beyond the Beyond.’
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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05.17.2018
10:49 am
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Cup of Cthulhu anyone?: Monstrous teacups inspired by your favorite cosmic entities
03.20.2018
09:51 am
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The best part of waking up is Cthulhu in your cup! Reclaimed vintage teacup and ceramic blood-red Cthulhu by Anthony Hicks.
 
Tacoma, Washington-based artist Anthony Hicks has been selling his cosmic oddities for nearly a decade in his Etsy shop, Tin Plate Studios. There you will find reclaimed vintage teacups which Hicks transforms into habitats for fictional monsters such as Cthulhu, and other tangible, tentacled monstrosities encased inside glass or other materials. According to Hicks, after watching the cinematic classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, he became somewhat obsessed with steampunk—an enduring genre that sprang from the realm of sci-fi and fantasy.

As you might imagine, Hicks lists H.P. Lovecraft as one of his primary influences as well as French inventor and aviation pioneer Clément Ader, and Charles Darwin. Hicks’ series “Travesties in Teacups” are quite literally to die for as are his many other imaginative creations that often appear to be all-too-realistic. In some cases, Hicks has incorporated salvaged taxidermy eyes from reptiles to help boost his creations creep-factor—and guess what? It works. I’ve posted a number of Hicks’ teacups as well as a few other items that can’t be unseen below. The talented artist also entertains custom orders and requests. The images that follow are slightly NSFW.
 

“Twin Homunculi” teacup.
 

“Millicent Teagazer” teacup.
 

“Pescasapien innsmouthii” teacup.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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03.20.2018
09:51 am
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H.P. Lovecraft HATED T.S. Eliot
03.02.2018
08:48 am
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H.P. Lovecraft with Felis, the cat of Frank Belknap Long

It’s fitting that I learned of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Waste Paper” by listening to some interview or other Alan Moore did. Of course, as a parody of “The Waste Land,” Lovecraft’s poem begins with a totally obscure epigraph, unsourced, and in the original Greek: Πἀντα γἐλως καἱ πἀντα κὀνις καἱ πἀντα τὁ μηδἐν. This turns out to be part of the sole surviving verse by Glycon—not the snake god whose priest on Earth is Alan Moore, mind you, but the eponymous poet and inventor of “glyconic meter.” Just as Glycon the god was a hoax, “exposed as a glove-puppet in the second century” (Alan Moore), the Oxford Classical Dictionary says Glycon the poet probably didn’t even write the lonely couplet that comprises his entire literary oeuvre.

And, as John Brannon would say, check it out: the second line Lovecraft left out of this two-line poem, presumably because he didn’t know it existed, elegantly summarized his worldview in seven Greek words: πάντα γὰρ ἐξ ἀλόγων ἐστὶ τὰ γινόμενα. It’s enough to make you agree with what Glycon, or whoever, was saying all along in his single, slender entry in the Greek Anthology, to which one translator added the heading “NIHILISM”:

All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothing,
for all that is cometh from unreason.

Or if you prefer Christopher Isherwood’s translation:

All is but laughter, dust and nothingness
All of unreason born. . . .

HPL omitted the line about “unreason,” according to this Lovecraft scholar, because it didn’t appear in the Greek lexicon that was his source. But “all that is cometh from unreason” would have been the perfect title for the horrified reaction to “The Waste Land” Lovecraft published in his journal, The Conservative, if not the perfect title for his entire collected works:

Do our members realise that the progress of science within the last half-century has introduced conceptions of man, the world, and the universe which make hollow and ridiculous an appreciable proportion of all the great literature of the past? Art, to be great, must be founded on human emotions of much strength; such as come from warm instincts and firm beliefs. Science having so greatly altered our view of the universe and the beliefs attendant upon that view, we are now confronted by an important shifting of values in every branch of art where belief is concerned. The old heroics, pieties, and sentimentalities are dead amongst the sophisticated; and even some of our appreciations of natural beauty are threatened. Just how expansive is this threat, we do not know; and The Conservative hopes fervently that the final devastated area will be comparatively narrow; but in any case startling developments are inevitable.

A glance at the serious magazine discussion of Mr. T. S. Eliot’s disjointed and incoherent “poem” called “The Waste Land”, in the November Dial, should be enough to convince the most unimpressionable of the true state of affairs. We here behold a practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general; offered to the public (whether or not as a hoax) as something justified by our modern mind with its recent comprehension of its own chaotic triviality and disorganisation. And we behold that public, or a considerable part of it, receiving this hilarious melange as something vital and typical; as “a poem of profound significance”, to quote its sponsors.

To reduce the situation to its baldest terms, man has suddenly discovered that all his high sentiments, values, and aspirations are mere illusions caused by physiological processes within himself, and of no significance whatsoever in an infinite and purposeless cosmos. He has discovered that most of his acts spring from hidden causes remote from the ones hitherto honoured by tradition, and that his so-called “soul” is merely (as one critic puts it) a rag-bag of unrelated odds and ends. And having made these discoveries, he does not know what to do about it; but compromises on a literature of analysis, chaos, and ironic contrast.

TL;DR: one racist reactionary prefers his own flavor of nihilism to another’s. Sounds like the narcissism of small differences to me! The poem, at least, is funny in parts. There are certain lines (“Meet me tonight in dreamland . . . BAH”) I can’t read without hearing the voice of the late Mark E. Smith.

Read H.P. Lovecraft’s “Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance,” after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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03.02.2018
08:48 am
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Surreal sci-fi-horror artwork by prolific Dutch painter Karel Thole


Here’s looking at you, kid. An intriguing piece of work by Dutch painter Karel Thole.
 
Karel Thole was a massively prolific Dutch artist with a flair for combining both surreal science fiction themes with horror. For much of his career, Thole’s inspired artwork appeared on the cover of the number-one-selling Italian science fiction magazine (at the time) Urania. The magazine featured stories from premiere American sci-fi authors such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Alan Dean Foster, Philip K. Dick as well as English great, J.G. Ballard. Italian authors also contributed, though they were widely published under aliases.

Thole was born Carolus Adrianus Maria Thole in Holland in 1914. He attended an arts-focused school in Amsterdam and would find work in and around the Netherlands as an artist until he relocated with his family to Italy in the late 50s. Once in Italy Thole’s work was embraced by the Italian art community. Thanks to his notoriety in Italy, it wouldn’t take long for images of Thole’s illustrations and paintings to reach the eyes of publishers in the U.S., Germany, and France—further solidifying his legacy as one of Europe’s most popular science fiction/horror artists.

Thole’s work has been compared to other influential, instantly recognizable artists such as Salvador Dali, Hieronymus Bosch, and German Dada pioneer Max Ernst (in particular his color palette), and with very good reason. Thole’s work possesses distinct surrealist qualities—visualized in his transcendental alien landscapes or in his beautifully crafted covers for modern publications featuring the work of of H.P. Lovecraft. Surprisingly, there has yet to be a book focusing on Thole’s way-out artwork. Let’s hope that happens soon. For now, you’ll have to dig on the images in this post and then perhaps hunt down a few vintage novels which feature Thole’s artwork to add to your collection. Some of what follows is NSFW.
 

A piece by Thole for German horror novel series Vampir-Horror-Roman.
 

Cover art by Thole for an issue of Urania.
 

Artwork by Thole for Galaktika #34, 1979. The magazine was published in Budapest from 1972-1995.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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01.11.2018
09:52 am
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I squid you not: H.P. Lovecraft inspired tentacle dildos are a thing
06.29.2017
11:14 am
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An example of the tentacle dildos made by Lovecrafters Toys.
 
These inspired and colorful dildos come from an Etsy shop called Lovecrafters Toys. It seems that the owner of the shop, Chae, has a thing for H.P. Lovecraft as most of the sex toys in her store are silicone tentacles which are made to order. According to the site, you’re able to trick out your toy in pretty much any color you want. Chae will even paint the “suckers” on the tentacles another color just in case having a tentacle dildo in one color scheme just won’t do it for you.

Depending on the colors you choose one will run you anywhere from $47 to around $72 bucks and can also be used as a strap-on. You know, because Cthulhu is probably into some pretty cosmic shit. NSFW images follow.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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06.29.2017
11:14 am
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Nightmarish sculptures of H.P. Lovecraft’s terrifying cosmic entities
01.09.2017
11:05 am
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‘Lovecraft Tormented’ wall sculpture. Get it here.
 
Like many of you oh-so-cool Dangerous Minds readers I am a collector of a great many THINGS. From records to books and a slew of action figures, my house is a mini-museum full of cool THINGS. I also happen to know that a number of our regular visitors to DM seem to have a thing for anything that associated with the great American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Which leads me to my post for today which features a number of intricate sculptures depicting some of Lovecraft’s eldritch entities such as “Dagon,” a creature that first made its appearance in Lovecraft’s short story of the same name from 1917; everyone’s favorite octopus-headed cosmic being, “Cthulhu”; Pickman’s model, and the nutty Nyarlathotep among others. I’m just aching to bring a few of these critters into my own menagerie of mayhem…

Some of the sculptures in this post are available for purchase. That said they are not cheap—specifically that magnificent wall sculpture “Lovecraft Tormented” (pictured at the top of this post). That puppy will run you a cool $1288. Several toy companies have released sets of Lovecraft’s monstrous nightmares and when they do, they sell out pretty fast, so if you see something in this post that strikes your fancy, get it now before it’s sold out and selling on eBay for bigs bucks. I’ve included some handy links for you to do just that under each available piece below.
 

‘Nyarlathotep’ sculpture by Sota Toys. Get it here.
 

‘Dagon’ sculpture. Get it here.
 
More Lovecraftian terrors after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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01.09.2017
11:05 am
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H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu gets the anime treatment
09.29.2016
01:07 pm
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The year 2018 will see the release of an omnibus anime feature film based on Force of Will, a fantasy trading card game first launched in 2012 in Japan—the project sounds vaguely similar to 2003’s The Animatrix based on the Matrix universe. Excitingly, one of the six movies is called “Cthulhu” and is based on H.P. Lovecraft‘s famous monster. Other narratives in the movie are called “Pinocchio,” “Monkey King,” and “Zombie.”

In his 1926 story “The Call of Cthulhu,” Lovecraft described his most famous creation, Cthulhu, as “a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.”

See the trailer after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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09.29.2016
01:07 pm
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The erotic, macabre art of Virgil Finlay, favorite illustrator of H.P. Lovecraft
07.26.2016
03:08 pm
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Finlay’s cover for the May 1952 issue of Weird Tales

Master of exquisitely detailed images that often combined the sexual and the scary, Virgil Finlay was born in Rochester, New York in 1914. He was a highly prolific commercial artist in the midcentury years — one commentator went so far as to call Finlay “the most famous fantasy illustrator of mid-twentieth century.”

In his youth during the 1920s, Finlay discovered the magazines Amazing Stories and Weird Tales, which focused on sci-fi and horror, respectively. Once he reached adulthood in the mid-1930s he felt confident enough in his artistic prowess to try to get a position at those journals. Finlay’s mastery of stippling was so advanced that it nearly cost him a job at Weird Tales because his employers weren’t sure that their printing process could reproduce his fine detail, but it turned out that it could.
 

Finlay in 1969
 
A key medium of Finlay’s was scratchboard, a method that incorporates a white clay coating covered in black ink—the artist scratches the black ink away with a scribe or knife, and the resultant effect is similar to a wood engraving. The technique is called “working from black to white,” whereas the more usual method of applying dark ink to a white surface is called “working from white to black.” Finlay’s originality and dedication to an impressive effect can be seen in the fact that he would sometimes blend both techniques in a single image, creating isolated areas of black which he would then scratch away to get a specific gray tone or the hatched or stippled effect he desired.

Finlay’s debut at Weird Tales occurred in the December 1935 issue, in which Finlay had illustrations for three different stories. Over the next two decades Finlay’s art would appear in 62 issues. He was also responsible for 19 color covers for Weird Tales. In 1938 he began working The American Weekly and moved from Rochester to New York.

The July 1937 issue of Weird Tales featured a remarkable homage to Finlay’s gifts, in the form of a poem dedicated to Finlay by the great horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. The poem was called “To Virgil Finlay Upon His Drawing of Robert Bloch’s Tale ‘The Faceless God’”—here is the image Lovecraft was referring to, and after that the poem itself:
 

 

In dim abysses pulse the shapes of night,
Hungry and hideous, with strange miters crowned;
Black pinions beating in fantastic flight
From orb to orb through soulless voids profound.
None dares to name the cosmos whence they course,
Or guess the look on each amorphous face,
Or speak the words that with resistless force
Would draw them from the halls of outer space.

Yet here upon a page our frightened glance
Finds monstrous forms no human eye should see;
Hints of those blasphemies whose countenance
Spreads death and madness through infinity.
What limnner he who braves black gulfs alone
And lives to wake their alien horrors known?

 
Much more after the jump…....

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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07.26.2016
03:08 pm
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The dark art of H.P. Lovecraft illustrator Lee Brown Coye
03.21.2015
05:06 pm
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Even in the twisted milieu of pulp illustration, Lee Brown Coye was an outlier. His was not a world of square-jawed detectives or musclebound Tarzan manqués, nor was he one to luridly but lovingly render the adipose flesh of reanimated dead in colorful gouaches. Coye did ten darkly expressionistic covers for Weird Tales between the mid ‘40s and early ‘50s, in dolefully subdued shades that emerged from dense, nihilistic black fields to coalesce into nightmarish wraiths. It was strong stuff that recalled Emil Nolde and Georges Roualt, and even if he’d never done anything else, those covers and his black and white interior work for that publication surely would have made him the cult figure who inspired Mike Mignola, Guillermo del Toro, and Stephen King. But there were also his macabre black and white ink drawings that graced book covers for the likes of Arkham House and Farrar & Reinhart. Coye secured his reputation with his work for the Sleep No More anthology before going on to produce definitive covers for H.P. Lovecraft works like The Dunwich Horror, At the Mountains of Madness, and perhaps his masterpiece, his work on Three Tales of Horror, which sports 19 Coye illustrations, all more than sufficiently disquieting to merit accompanying Lovecraft’s dark mythos.
 

 

 
More eldritch darkness after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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03.21.2015
05:06 pm
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The Cuddlification of Cthulhu
02.21.2014
05:09 pm
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cthulhu leggings1
 
Cthulhu leggings from Ali Express

After endless weeks of snow, ice, and subzero temperatures, the clear, starry winter sky makes a girl’s thoughts turn to one thing: H.P. Lovecraft.

In the manner of people who like to kit themselves out with ducks, spouting whales, pink flamingos, or lucky cats, it is possible to dress head to toe in Cthulhu-themed clothing, jewelry, and accessories. Not to mention all those Cthulhu tea cosies, car decals, window stickers, class rings, Jello molds, and holiday decorations.

Some of these items are downright cute, an adjective never used by Lovecraft in his Cthulhu mythos. The cuddlification of Cthulhu drives a lot of people…well, mad. He’s supposed to inspire mind-fucking fear, not make you want to snuggle him as a plush toy or wear him as a comfy accessory! Still, Geek Crafts is why some of us learned handicrafts.

Cthulhu charm bracelet
 
Stuart Williams’ Lovecraftian Charm Bracelet


cthulhu medallion necklace
 
Stuart Williams’ Cthulhu Medallion Necklace


cthulhu scarf ravelry
 
Cthulhu Scarf knitting pattern from Merelen’s Knits on Ravelry


cthulhu scarf humphreys
 
Crocheted Cthulhu scarf from Humphreys Handmade
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Kimberly J. Bright
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02.21.2014
05:09 pm
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Tentacled H. P. Lovecraft Sculpture
10.29.2012
10:55 am
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image
 
An H.P. Lovecraft faux bronze bust by Lee Joyner.

According to Joyner’s Facebook page, the busts should be availble to purchase “in the next few days.”

Via Superpunch

Posted by Tara McGinley
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10.29.2012
10:55 am
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Lovecraft For Kids: The Adventures of Lil’ Cthulhu
11.03.2009
06:10 pm
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image
 
Here’s one of the lessons I plan on imparting, someday, to my kids: stay away from Lovecraft!  Or at least until they’re 13.  Should children below that age really be entertaining thoughts of an Old One invasion?  Well, animator Zachary Murray says “yes” (or whatever passes for an affirmative on Vhoorl).  His following short (approved, mind you, by the department of child-developmental psychology at Miskatonic University) seeks to awaken the wee ones to Cthulhu‘s call:

 
(via Laughing Squid)

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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11.03.2009
06:10 pm
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Drive the Ladies Howling Mad With Cthulhu Cologne
09.18.2009
11:50 am
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image

 

A creeping, wet, slithering scent, dripping with seaweed, oceanic plants and dark, unfathomable waters.

Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft, available at Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.18.2009
11:50 am
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