Weird Tales, Volume 51 (3 page)

Years' worth of scrounging junk shops, flea markets, hardware stores, and old attics has yielded a pack rat's horde of car parts and musical instruments, antique brassware and opera gloves. A wall of drawers in her studio contains fish scales, umbrella tips, glass eyes, universal ball joints, tiny bolts, miniature springs.

And then there are the skulls. Some are real bone, obtained from dealers in osteological specimens, and some are only replicas as clever as Joslin's creations themselves. She strives to make it impossible to tell which are real and which are not. In fact, the overall impression one gets from her animals, no matter how piecemeal or whimsical, is one of reality.

The assembly can take weeks, even months. In the depths of her studio, Joslin transforms the unlikely materials into creatures so plausible that one cannot imagine them reduced to their component parts. The almost Nouveau lines of their skeletal forms are lively, even when wrought of the most strange and inorganic of materials. A brass-boned dog in a leather harness raises one paw, his dark eyes eager to please, tail all but wagging. Caught in mid-swing, a monkey seems about to reach up to grab the next brass branch. The creatures always appear on the brink of motion.

On close examination, one realizes they are. Since welding would destroy the delicate patina on the antique parts, Joslin painstakingly joins them together with tiny bolts, springs, and couplings. The technique allows for all sorts of surprises: beaks open, tails flex, necks bend and jaws part. Some of Joslin's surprisingly sturdy beasts are freestanding and poseable. And like all animals, they are not always well-behaved: The artist has admitted that more than one of her creations has bitten her.

Yet these are clearly not mongrels spawned in a post-apocalyptic junk pile — these well-groomed creatures rest comfortably on upholstered cushions, wearing ruffs of silk and velvet. Their brass armatures are lovingly burnished, their white bones covered with filigree and ornamented with jewels and gewgaws. These are pampered luxury pets for the aristocrats of a world fashioned from the remnants of our own.

What began as a simple love for an ever-diminishing natural world has seemingly grown to encompass a parallel love of the discarded, a desire to use what has been left behind. There is a comparison to be made to taxidermy—but even the best taxidermy lacks the animation shown by these composite beasts, which don't in any way give the impression of being inanimate or dead. Joslin's creatures lack nothing; she has not preserved something vanished, but created something new: "I make my beasts because they are what I dreamed of discovering, but they didn't exist anywhere, so I had to make them myself."

Jessica's new book, Strange Nature, is now available from the Lisa Sette Gallery:
www.lisasettegallery.com
.

SKULL-A-DAY
(
skulladay.blogspot.com
)

The human skull is an instantly recognizable symbol, primal in appearance and visceral in impact: the hollows of the eyes and cheekbones, the empty hole of the nose, the grinning teeth. At once repellent and beautiful, it hits us where we live because we know, deep down,
that is our face
. Last year, internationally-known artist and activist Noah Scalin took the theme to heart and committed himself to creating a skull a day. Executed in an astonishing diversity of media including oil paint, sheet metal, food, and x-rays, the images are sometimes whimsical and often disturbing. The recently-completed project is chronicled online at Scalin's daily blog, where he also shares readers' found and created skull images.
Skulls
, a compilation of Scalin's Skull-A-Day work, will be released by Lark Books in October.

ART OF ADORNMENT
(
www.artofadornment.ca
)

Vancouver artist Elaine Foster, better known as Valerian, is the one-woman powerhouse behind Art of Adornment, an online store celebrating the Belle Époque fusion of style and beauty. Valerian has dedicated herself to providing quality, handmade items at a reasonable price. Using antique tools and the finest materials she creates chokers, hats, pins, watch chains and more. Collections such as Sanguine, Lucrezia, and Nocturne offer the browser a wide choice of colors and styles, and many of the handmade, one-of-a-kind items are customizable. Elegant, decadent, and darkly beautiful, Art of Adornment offers Victorian gothic accessories that are as unique as the wearer.

* * *

THE MONSTER WITH THE SHAPE OF ME

by Brian J. Hatcher

For a moment, I saw a rose die
just a little as I walked by.
The color of its petals waned,
the sun's benediction cruelly restrained,
by a monster with the shape of me.

But only a moment, and then I passed.
Then the bright crimson color, at last
returned, in an instant, freshly renewed,
the tender bud's hue no more subdued
by a monster with the shape of me.

Too often, I feel my gaze pulled down
to that black shape upon the ground
that gently kills but never buries,
for, in God's mercy, it seldom tarries,
that monster with the shape of me.

Yet, if I could but bear the sun
then I'd need never dwell upon
that form which mocks my every breath
and coldly tempts the earth with death,
that monster with the shape of me.

But the sun's bright face I cannot see.
It blinds, it burns, it accuses me.
Its fiery truth casts me away
into the arms of my decay.
A monster with the shape of me.

It hints to secrets in my past,
as if a smoky scrying glass
that knows my evils bound within.
It seems to me the soul of sin,
a monster with the shape of me.

And yet my terror is mine alone.
For this obsession is my own,
who sees the shadow on my wall
and fears the vapor that I call
the monster with the shape of me.

But soon, one day, my heart will still
as I am broken upon life's wheel.
And then, except perhaps a memory,
there will be nothing left to be
the monster with the shape of me.

* * *

VIKTOR KOEN'S BIOMECHANICAL VISIONS

Our special guest cover artist chats with Weird Tales arts & culture
editor Amanda Gannon about adaptation, transformation, and life at the center
of the universe.

Businessmen are reborn as biomechanical insects. Beautiful and battle-ravaged woman/weapon hybrids haunt desolate landscapes. Such is the duality that infuses Viktor Koen's weird artwork.

Many of his figures are caught in the middle of some devastating transformation, or at the moment when the hidden becomes the apparent and the imagined becomes shockingly real. To Koen, everything contains a hidden nature, everything is constantly changing, and that's what makes his work so grimly fascinating—he sees this inner nature, and he shares his unflinching vision with us.

Born in Thessaloniki, Greece, Koen holds degrees from the Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design in Jerusalem and from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He's a New Yorker, now, with an astounding litany of awards, exhibits, and high-profile clients.

His method underscores the transformative motif: his work itself has evolved from classical roots into a hybrid of digital and traditional forms, yielding images at once phantasmagorical and all too believable. It's not immediately apparent how much is real, how much artifice. The question is immaterial; it all must be taken at face value, for what Koen shows us is the very darkness hidden beneath the world's façade.

Your work is a complicated process, a synthesis of many methods. How do you pull together all of the elements? What are some of the stages an image goes through before it's complete?

Sometimes I do sketches, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I have something very specific in my mind from the first, and other times I let the image lead the way. As soon as I have the idea, I will compile my photographic references and the raw materials. I usually like to shoot details myself; I like to shoot interesting pieces of equipment, I shoot strange landscapes or sky formations when I see them.

Most times I shoot without really knowing when and how I will use the photographs, so in any specific project, half of the photographs I use are shots that I have already taken (for no other reason than my visual obsessions), and the other half are things that I specifically need to find and capture. This turns my job to a treasure hunt, but in this city there is one of everything and I will find it when I need it.

And then I start the painstaking process of cleaning things up. I do a lot of hand-tinting, and then assembling, and when I'm happy with the image and the composition, I start actually fusing the parts together. This fusion gets tricky since everything has been shot under different light conditions, so colors look different and light sources look different. I'm trying to homogenize all of these by hand tinting and lowering colors that are too vibrant so there's a color match between the pieces of the composition. And then, lighting: I like to use dramatic shadowing; that is a residue of projects I did on film noir covers quite a few years ago, and that was a turning point in the way I light and shade my images. I think the secret to a seamless composition is really balancing colors nd shadows.

You want your work to challenge people's assumptions. In exploring the themes of your work while you research and create it, have you ever found your own assumptions challenged?

Yes. A lot of information you get on the surface is very different from what you find out after in-depth research. I love to read, I love to research, I'm a history buff, so I will use the turns and twists according to the information I receive in the beginning, and try to incorporate things I learn. Especially in a series, by keeping things loose conceptually in the beginning, you give yourself some time to start putting the initial stages of the image together but also to read and find out if what you're doing is working, and to incorporate changes if need be. Concepts sometimes do change, evolve, take different turns.

Now if, in the process of one series, I run into something that is very different and unique, I might start a whole new series. I will use something from the research for a previous theme to start something totally new. I may run into something that is very exciting conceptually, and that always comes with the potential to create interesting images. It's sort of like a hydra, a monster . . . you cut one head and then two spring up, and I like that—I like to have an excuse to make more images.

What inspired you to move away from traditional media and into digital art?

I have to say that my transition from a person who painted in acrylics into a digital artist was a seamless one. I found that my projects work best with the realistic elements that photographs give you and paintings or drawings don't. So I like that twist, that momentary illusion or delusion of something looking real. I like making someone take a closer look, so that they discover the twist, delivered with the conceptual punch.

At first, I would compose things with photocopies, transfer them to sheets of acetate, and paint them with acrylics. Slowly the photocopying transformed into scanning, which was much cheaper than making countless photocopies of every single piece of reference. Also, gradually, by shooting more of my own references I used my sensibilities and sensitivities to create my inventory of raw materials. The painting turned into digital tinting and mixing of textures that I had photographed myself.

It took quite a few years to get from one to the other, but it happened gradually, until it came to a point where the process was totally digital but really deeply-rooted in traditional media. I don't think the technique I use is so advanced. I really consider myself very old-fashioned as far as digital art is concerned, but I like it this way.

My foundations are very traditional, very classical. I studied academic drawing and painting in Greece. A visual education doesn't get much more classical than this. I had to feel very stable in the foundations of what I do in order to grow and develop into a digital artist. Bringing everything I know into one platform, the computer, was the only way for my images to work. That's what I like, pouring things onto the screen and experimenting with things that I scan or doodle or photograph or find. Then I can really do something with them. The computer becomes a great desktop—literally—to bring things together and fuse them, turn them into something totally different.

In your
Funnyfarm
series, there's a piece called “Future Shock,” which is the idea that Western society is changing so rapidly that people are failing to change or adapt to meet new challenges. Now, you've clearly risen to meet the challenges of new technology—you're exploring that through your art. How do you think it's affecting the rest of the artistic world? Are you seeing future shock, or are you seeing evolution?

I don't believe people need to evolve if they don't want to. I mean, there's beautiful painting and drawing, there's a place for every kind of artwork. I think that people impose those limitations upon themselves and they panic, thinking they really need to be doing something new, all the time.

If you're good at what you're doing and you're passionate about it, I don't believe you have anything to worry about. In publishing and graphic design, you could not avoid the digital revolution. Even so, there are plenty of traditional print shops that produce beautiful work with hand-set and hand-cut type; they're using the traditional techniques of publishing. They are rare, sought-after and lucrative for the people who really have the drive to stick with what they love and want.

If you're someone who has things to say and is good at something, there's really no reason to move to [a style] that looks more advanced or fashionable or trendy. That's not the point. I think these future shocks are self-imposed. If you're always running after a belated “it,” you will always be a victim of the latest “it.”

Your subjects often combine the artificial with the actual. Your work is quite confrontational that way; it puts that duality right in your face. What is it that fascinates you so much about figures in transition or figures that aren't what they seem to be?