2022

The joey Zone

ARS NECRONOMICA 2022: The Visual Divine of the Dark Cosmos, Here and Beyond. Providence, RI: AS220 Aborn Gallery. August 11-28, 2022.

The biennial art exhibition Ars Necronomica is both an independent entity and part of a continuing tradition begun in 2013 with the regeneration of NecronomiCon [Providence]. With The Lovecraft Circle (including Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and others), HPL has rightly “been acknowledged as the godfather to collaborative creative culture…in this tradition of collaboration” the art show set out to “honor the legacy and life of a literary iconoclast” [This reviewer’s italics on the quote from the 2013 exhibition’s Mission Statement]. The convention’s 2017 Memento Book defined this further: “Each installment is a chapter in a larger story—our curatorial perception of not just a Lovecraftian aesthetic but how we see weird art itself.”

This year’s fifth perception has been held in conjunction with the convention itself now looking beyond H. P. Lovecraft “to all the latest authors and artists who are now expanding the field of [The Weird]” with admission that many of them now don’t draw “any influence from Lovecraft” (MOTIF magazine, August 3, 2022). Only 19 of the 50 pieces in the exhibit were Lovecraftian, let alone directly using his fictions as a narrative base. Of the remaining number were, however, several deserving wall space in any showcase, of Weird or otherwise.

Abomination takes many forms.

Foremost among these was Alan Brown’s watercolor with gouache entitled “Magic Moves,” boasting a hand carved figural frame and colour juxtaposition that itself appeared to render line in three dimensions. A depiction of Grendel (from Beowulf) as The Hanged Man of Tarot (also a grim leitmotif in William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley), it was a welcome return of this artist’s work to Ars Necronomica after his last entry in 2017. Brown bears credit for much of the better art on successful early pressings by Cadabra Records, starting with The Hound and especially The Lurking Fear, with a member of the Martense clan perfectly defined for that LP’s inner gatefold sleeve.

Rhode Island inkslinger Maegan Lemay was clearly the breakout star of this year’s convention. Designing NecronomiCon’s official t-shirt (which was rumored to have sold out by Saturday of the schedule), she was also responsible for the poster of one of the musical concerts held as part of the festivities. The band Cirith Ungol—despite their Tolkien derived moniker—has also used Michael Moorcock’s Elric on their record covers and Maegan depicted the albino Melnibonean and Stormbringer handily with her strong sword, er—tattooing arm. Lemay’s style displays skill similarly found in the work of, say, Brian Bolland or even FINLAY, this being evident in her submission to Ars Necronomica “The Abyss”.

Notable other pieces on display included that by Nick Gucker; a darker than usual painting by one of the exhibition’s co-curators, Jennifer Hrabota Lesser, “Where the Black Stars Rise;” Matt Jaffe’s original for John Langan’s collection Children of the Fang; and two works by the unfortunately recently deceased Marcello Gallegos.

In order to truly see a thing, one must first understand it.

More Mythos than these was the art of Liv Rainey Smith, a Portland Oregon printmaker without whom Ars Necronomica would not be the quality show that it has been throughout the years. Whether in wood or linocut, she carves out bold lines that delineate true knowledge of The Arcane. “Through the Gates” revisits a deity Smith had summoned for the 2013 exhibition, the great subterranean toad god Tsathoggua. Liv’s imprint on our Scene is worthy of many editions—A geas then upon her that they have an eternal run!

Originals of other published work on display included Jason Eckhardt’s scratchboard of “The Alert” (The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft) and Josh Yelle’s triptych for the Robert W. Waugh collections put out by the publisher of this journal. Sculptors contributed more of this Lovecraftian based art, from Karen Main’s circular polymer clay leering entity “GYACK,” to Gage Prentiss’ “Lake Expedition Fossil Specimen #44”, a crinoidian inhabitant monstrous in size, to exhibition versions of molds by stalwarts Jason McKittrick and Joe Broers. One is in constant awe of all those working in this medium, making the indescribable tangible.

From what secret regions of astronomy or time, from what ancient and now incalculable twilight…it reached this South American suburb…

From the boulevards of Buenos Aires, the home of Borges (from whom these quotes are taken), we were honored to welcome as this year’s Artist Guest of Honor Santiago Caruso. His oeuvre epitomizes the legacy and future of what should be Ars Necronomica. Caruso has illuminated the writings of Dante, Kafka, Schwob and Lautréamont, his paintings for Los cantos de Maldoror (2016) being the standout (“Among the best I’ve seen”, wrote 2015 Artist GoH John Coulthart). Con attendees may know Santiago better from editions of Chambers, Bierce, Campbell or Pugmire including his art. For this exhibition, however, eleven watercolors were torn or razored (then fortunately framed) from a 2022 notebook—all of them illustrating the work of H. P. Lovecraft.

In 2015, ARS Necronomica had shown a handful of Caruso’s work, some done in monochromatic scratchboard. His current medium glowed with colours giving additional sustenance to sentient miasmas emanating from below (“The Unnameable Cemetery”) or within (“The Witch House”—also used as the cover of this year’s Memento Book—it’s gambreled structure seemingly high lit ala director Richard Stanley). This reviewer’s favorite selection was “ ‘Til The Kingsport Cathedral” based on Lovecraft’s “The Festival”. The rolling sea and dark universe yawn upon another high house in the mist “gleaming out in the cold dusk” extending a spir’d finger towards “Orion and the archaic stars.” It is the Yuletide.

Yet more groundbreaking was another work illustrating “The Dreams in the Witch House.” Due to its deep incarnadined hues, it is difficult for even the finest photogravure to grant justice in reproduction to what was seen in persona: An accurate pictorial depiction of “the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex” obeying “laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos.” Santiago has accomplished no mean feat of taking us—to use the title of Fritz Leiber’s famous essay—through hyperspace with Brown Jenkin. This visual divination, along with his other ten offerings, have alone raised the bar on Lovecraftian as well as Weird art in general, going on from here into the beyond. A fuller (?) exhibition promised in 2024 may be possible, but no finer art can be perceived in our philosophy. We will not flinch in the hope of being proved wrong.

Curiosity got the better of fear, and I did not close my eyes.

The joey Zone

LEE BROWN COYE, Scrying Stones & Dolmen & Others: Chips & Shavings 1963-1964. Foreword by Mike Hunchback. Camillus, NY: Chiroptera Press, 2022. 78 pp. $36 tpb.
limited edition.

Scrawny and thin my dead come in
But looks are soon forgotten.

With respect to Ye Grizzled Shade, we can never unsee your art, Lee Brown Coye. The dermatology of a typical Coye (1907-1981) personage—revenant or living—is reminiscent of twisted sunbaked roadkill. His construction of architecture is all ingrown and fuzzy, the surrounding landscapes subscribing to a Wilmarthian permaculture. Lee’s influence can be deduced in superlative modern-day scratches with gleeful grue of GUCKER or the feathery shadows of FELTON. But there is only one COYE.

The cover of this newest Chiroptera Press offering is one of his most brutal table settings: “Murgunstrumm’s Work Room” from the title tale of Hugh B. Cave’s Carcosa collection of 1977. This wrapper belies its contents however—here be a quieter creep. Words etching a stillness unnerving:

Sometimes—minutes or hours later—a terrible silence woke him and he jumped from his chair. He looked at the clock. It had stopped and the tick sound was gone…The peepers had
stopped and though he could see the splash of rain against the window there was no patter.  The kerosene lamp burned but dimly. The wind had gone down and he hung shivering in a vast nothing.

The eighteen stories comprising Scrying Stones are accurately described in the publisher’s prospectus as “less literary fictions than they are examples of American folklore” from “a time of horse drawn hearses and handmade coffins.” Coye could be properly classified therefore as a Regionalist, much like Lovecraft. Ten stories had been previously transmitted audibly in the Cadabra Record releases Where Is Abby? & Other Tales and Scrying Stones & Dolmen (2015 and 2018 respectively). These were read by Lee’s son, Robert Coye, who also corrected the texts in this volume before his death in June 2021. All had originally appeared as “Chips & Shavings” columns of the local Mid-York Weekly.

Four “Shavings” previously unseen or heard since original publication are: “The Black Dog”, a surprisingly sweet tale of a dog showing his owner where he should have been buried; “In Sight Fill My Soul”, a version of The Phantom Hitchhiker folktale, getting you to take her to a dance first; “Three Steps and About Face”, which describes the regimen of the ghost of a Continental soldier, albeit one only three feet high. Albeit just the mix of too many boilermakers with a dash of narrator; and “Spooked House,” being a standout melodrama not dealing in the supernatural, with but “little need to fabricate the morbid when reality was harsh and grim enough.”

The importance of this reprinted work is cemented by its title piece “Scrying Stones & Dolmen,” a set of correspondence between Coye and others in something of a roman à clef including “John Vedder” [Vetter]; “Anthony Davis” [August Derleth]; and “Andrew Rothman” [Rothovius]. This regards weird geologic and wooden constructs glimpsed in Central New York’s “Burnt Over District,” “a belt of territory which seems to stretch along the length of the Erie Canal and toward the west that has been productive of many strange cults and beliefs.”

Dead wood thus spoke to Lee Brown Coye and, as Mike Hunchback writes in his foreword, “he never stopped seeing those sticks in his mind, eventually drawing them over and over.” A treatise on the omnipresent crescent moons in those drawings remains to be conjectured. Karl Edward Wagner based a story upon this ‘conversation’–“Sticks” appeared in Stuart Schiff’s third issue of Whispers in 1974 (Here I might blasphemously proffer one of Stephen Fabian’s better illustrations appended to the yarn where this reviewer first encountered it, in the first Whispers anthology collection of 1977). In a blur, The Blair Witch Project (1999) culturally appropriated those twig-formed sigils. For that matter, the code in J. H. Watson’s treatise on the “Adventure of The Dancing Men” posits a runic predecessor.

The stories of Lee Brown Coye himself however will not only “live on through the long tradition of weird fiction small press adulation” but once read cannot be unseen. Nor in the posterity of print soon forgotten.