Engraved Victorian tentacle-horrors from Dan Hillier
Dan Hillier's Cthuloid drawings sport engraved Victorian gentlemen and ladies who are magically twisting into tentacled horrors. I just bought this one from the artist himself at a market stall in London's Brick Lane, and it's proudly hanging on my wall. I'm restraining myself (just barely) from buying more.
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This reminds me of a William Gibson short story "The Belonging Kind".
Those are great! While I've been able to find the occasional Lovecraftian tentacle horror, I haven't yet seen an artist try to represent the strange, non-euclidean monsters and objects that drive men mad by their mere interaction with our dimension. Maybe something like the Hounds of Tindalos?
I picture here some strange chimera that is a cross between the creatures in Carpenter's The Thing and those animations I've seen of quaternion fractals changing over time.
This illustration goes wonderfully with a great Robyn Hitchcock song called "Victorian Squid" on the album "You and Oblivion".
If you don't know Robyn, you should check him out!
These are cool, but props must be given to Max Ernst, especially his book of surreal victorian engraving collages : "100 headless woman" or "A Week of Kindness" (circa 1920's)
http://www.spamula.net/blog/archives/000198.html
I love the artwork and his online gallery is incredible! I'm going to London in April as part of a class trip, whats the location of his gallery there?
I really dig this one. Strangely, it reminds me of some photos I took recently. Weird!
A quick question- is this print actually produced by engraving (i.e. printed from an engraved plate), or does the 'engraving' just refer to the source of the non-tentacled parts of the image?
The term 'engraving' is sometimes used to cover a number of printing techniques other than true engraving- I was under the impression that most Victorian mass-market illustrations were etched rather than engraved (though I'd be delighted to be corrected if someone knows better).
this reminds me a lot of the art of claudia drake, who uses vintage drawings and engravings in collage.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/claudiadrake/sets/72157600044479607/
Machiavellism@4: I found him in a Sunday market stall in Brick Lane, not a gallery. You might email him the week you're coming to find out where he's setting up shop.
I'm pretty sure these images aren't Dan's "drawings" as much as they are collages/reworks of existing engravings. I recognize most of the elements from the Dover Pictoral Archives (as organized in some great-and-cheap paperbacks by Jim Harter).
This is also the same source from which O'Reilly culls the animal images used for the covers of their books.