Tomorrow at 7pm, Breath of the Black Muse opens at the Black Vulture Gallery in Fishtown, PA. This celebration of the macabre arts is the first of a series of installations curated by JL Joseph Beaulieu at Black Vulture that will showcase artists whose work is so often admired in the metal/hardcore/blackmetal scenes. This first installation in the quarterly series features artists from around the world, including Belgium artists Kluze Hellion and Patina Vas Diaz, Irish artist Paul McCarroll, Brooklyn’s Karlynn Holland – who also curates the Dreams Were Made for Mortals series, Bianca Olson from California, Seldon Hunt from NYC, Yeshua Hill from Burlington, VT, and many more talented and morbid artists. If you’re in the area tomorrow, we highly recommend that you check out Breath of the Black Muse! Check out some preview pieces and a list of the artists showing after the jump…

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Blackmeat is an artgroup consisted of two russian artists Konstantin Tarasov and Pavel Lyakhov, whom I have not been able to collect very much converse from, yet have spurned my imagination to places I have not bothered or perhaps not been able to think about yet with their manifest of weird dark art. This only hungers my palette for further invocation of paint, and pencil produced from the temporally diffused sections of this man’s mind. I came across his exhibit entitled ПОD. Displaying a commerce of occultic and deathly incipit art in the confines of a cave, illuminated by horrifying glows and the halo of candles. A peer into his collection, if unknowing of the creator, one might suppose a reliquary tribe of aghori, venting their altered perception of the world and using the pictures as ritual shrines. This might be one even to fool anthropologists if they were to stumble on its array of dark displays of death, blood, and form. Sometimes the pictures seem at one with the eerie atmosphere of the cave, and other times a stark aberration of life and physicality of hallucination. The Existence “ПOD” meaning (“UNDER”) took place in a cave in February 2011. It is considered that it was the first exhibition in history of modern dark art which took place in a real cave (artwoks are still there) which means that it was really “underground”. Despite its expressiveness and gloominess the project took your attention to the relevant social problems. Cult of violence and a fear of being “not perfect” accompany the mankind in its way from cave existence to nowadays and uncover a disappointing reality: a human being in his historical aspiration for better life fights with his environment forgetting of where he has come from. Disharmony in humans environment leads to physical and mental mutations. We return to our backgrounds and realize that “we didn’t leave our caves, we just have made them more comfortable created seas of blood around us”. The collection seems to be suppressed in such a way to show on a 2 dimensional screen, but one might be able to transcend the value of this art and immerse their mindset at least into it’s outpouring…

But this are not the only things spewed out by Константин Тарасов & Pavel Lyakhov, not content with just bending the perceptions of imagery, but somehow philosophizing on it as well with acts of provocative augmentation. One of their other exhibits transforms the mere looking of, and permanence of ar,t into a window of experience wherein as the paintings become destroyed by fire after they have been seen…

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Enter a world of technicolor madness, with patterns assaulting your eyes in blinding color and images tearing at your retinas with whirling movement. This is the universe of Claudio Parentela, painter, illustrator, collagist and artist of all trades. His pieces are a humorous take on pop culture and mass mythology, combining collage and paint to create beautiful hideous creatures. Standards of female beauty are central to much of his work, but he depicts it as grotesque and ridiculous, with arms and legs askew, lips blubbering, doe eyes bleeding. I enjoy how he reworks models into monsters and objectifies Hitler with massive breasts and hairy legs -you don’t realize how suggestive his gaze is until it is perched on a weirdly sexy body. This artwork reminds me of John berger’s Ways of Seeing, in that Parentela has turned the objective gaze of patriarchy on its head, revealing the jumble of contradictions behind its simple dichotomies. After the jump, prepare to have your rods and cones blown away by Claudio Parentela.

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“Cheap” movies always have a special place in my heart, be it film noir, exploitation, surreal, ‘cult’, horror, or even sci-fi. Not just about the cheesy stories, but they also have the best titles and even the coolest taglines than other ‘mainstream’ movies. How come you dont love the titles like “I Dismember Mama”, “Plan 9 From Outer Space”, “I Was A Teenage Frankenstein”, “Night Of The Howling Beast”, “I Was A Shoplifter” or even “Teenagers From Outer Space”? Fuckin’ ‘classy’ movie titles! Well dont forget about the poster’s artworks too: the vibrant colors, the illustrations, the layout and typos are amazing. Collecting original vintage movie posters is always worthed, even the price of original movie posters like “Jaws” or “Creature From The Black Lagoon” are amazingly insane! Well enough said, check out some cool “B” movie posters after the jump!

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I’ve always been interested with visual art since my early years, I bought and collected various Japanese comics when I was around 8 or 9. But when I came to a bookstore to buy a comic with my parents, suddenly I saw a stack of horror novels and the covers really attracted me. Yes it was Goosebumps, I picked up a copy that day – I remember it was “The Beast From The East”. I have to admit that the main reason I bought the novel was because of the cover art, I couldnt get enough of the series ever since. If you have keen eyes, some of the covers have the signature of the cover artist Tim jacobus. He’s became one of my first fav artist as a kid, I remember I tried to redraw “Vampire Breath” and “Bad Hare Day” back then. The vibrant colors and the surrealistic yet horror imagery that Tim created really stimulate the reader’s imagination, you can tell after seeing the covers that the stories are rad. Dont judge the book by its cover? Well I have to disagree! I cant seem to find the scans of the covers in good quality, but anyway check out Tim Jacobus’ cover artworks after the jump!

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As a visual artist, doing art collaboration is always fun and keeps me creative. Especially if the artist we collaborate with has a unique style, or if the technique is different from usual. I love anything surreal and bizarre, for me doing an Exquisite Corpse collaboration is a homage to the Surrealism movement. Some of you might wondering, what the fuck is Exquisite Corpse? Exquisite Corpse was invented by Surrealists and started about 1925, but different source would say it was already invented before 1918. It was started as a “writing game”, one player would write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player. The name of the collaboration is derived from a phrase that resulted when Surrealists first played the game: “Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau” (“The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine”), and later this technique was adapted to drawing and collage. But the technique is not forgotten, nowadays many artists still doing Exquisite Corpse. Usually an artist would draw / make a collage on a paper, and let half of the paper blank. When he/she has finished, his/her part will be covered except for 3 cm. This artwork will be sent via mail, and other collaborator will finish the blank part with only seeing 3 cm strip. Other way is done digitally, but the same rule still apply: only let a small part seen. Sounds rad right? Here are some Exquisite Corpse done by Surrealists, both from the pioneers and nowadays artists!

Paul Éluard, André Breton & Nusch Éluard (1929)

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My favorite issues of Juxtapoz have always been the ones that feature dark, weird and disturbing artwork – but there are always a lot of pages I skip through to get to my favorite parts. It turns out, someone has created my perfect magazine, and it’s called Fire Mass. Fire Mass is dedicated to the dark arts and folklores, and features many of the artists we’ve covered on CVLT Nation and many, many more that I have to cover. The issues are in glorious full color, all except the Shadowplay issue, which is in equally glorious black and white, and they are serious eye candy for the appreciator of twisted imagery. They also feature stories, poems, interviews and all kinds of magickal things that you want in your world just to make it a little bit creepier. The next issue of Fire Mass will be released very soon, and for now you can go to their store HERE and purchase hard copies, and you can also get free digital downloads of all their issues, which I am subsisting on right now until I can get the hard copies. The zines are 8.5″ x 11″ and anywhere from 64 to 80 pages, and from the pictures they look like they are beautiful to hold. Check out a few preview pages after the jump, and this is a call for support for Fire Mass – these are the kind of publications that we need to keep around!
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When a person is truly creative, their abilities usually span many genres. One such person is Crisis‘ lead singer of 13 years, Karyn Crisis, she of the epic dreadlocks. Her inspirations are things that also touch me deeply and haunt my imagination – shamanism, reiki, la vecchia religione, mediumship, clairvoyance. She paints in vivid, bursting colors that provoke emotions at a spirit level while they inflame the mind with thoughts. With her artwork, Karyn Crisis brings the viewer into her inner world, one that connects with the other planes of existence, the ones that most of us don’t see with our eyes. Many of her subjects are the powerful women that delve into the human spirit and the non-human universe – the healers who connect our energies to the currents of the world, the witches who embrace the potency of the goddess, the shaman who marry the spirit to the body. Her subjects vibrate with life beyond their own, and ask the viewer to expand their consciousness beyond what is kind and comfortable, to look into death and the living decay, to “see light in dark places.” Her Tarot series reinterprets those classic images from the occult, which she showed as a solo exhibition last year in Berkeley. After the jump, explore some of her recent paintings and sculpture…some of them are for sale on her Etsy shop…

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Dreams Were Made for Mortals III opened it’s doors at St. Vitus Bar in Brookyln for one night last weekend, and CVLT Nation is stoked to have had a special part of it. DWMFM III featured work by renowned artists and photographers like Vincent Como, Seldon Hunt, Samantha Marble, Kirsten Flaherty, Jeremy Hush, Kat Crosgrove, Justina Villanueva and more – including the curator herself, Karlynn Holland. For the third installment of her exhibit, Holland commissioned a dark, furious, cacophony of music from CVLT Nation, and we delivered. Below you can stream the CVLT Nation DWMFM III Nightmares Mix, an acidic blend of Black Metal and Blackened Crust that will burn into your ears until your brain is a charred mess. After the jump, check out photos of the opening as well as selected works by some of the artists who showed, and also to download the CVLT Nation DWMFM III Mix…

Stream CVLT Nation DWMFM III Nightmare Mix:

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It’s on today – we are kicking off a new feature, CVLT Nation’s Tumblr of the Week. I really dig nerding out on tumblr, because it’s another way to see what’s in the human head, and it’s eye-opening to see so many different points of view. First up is one of our favorite artists, Jason Barnett aka CURSED DEATH – every time I see his art, it melts my mind. His art is so unique, and his use of color is amazing. Going to Jason’s tumblr is like taking a trip into his own personal gallery. Much respect to Jason Barnett – keep doing what you are doing homie! Now CVLT Nation readers, take a journey into CURSED DEATH.

Gallery After The Jump!
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