The nightmarish black and bright body, the amorphous body emitting a foul odor, squirming forward, flowing... An amorphous protoplasmic swollen vesicle, shining with a faint shimmer, tens of thousands of green,000 pus-like eyes constantly forming and decomposing on its surface... It snaked past the ground, which had been cleared by it and its kind without leaving a single grain of dust and shone with evil reflections. The terrifying, mocking cry sounded again: Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!
—Howard Philip Lovecraft, "Mountains of Madness"
From the deepest recesses of churning, Lovecraft-esque darkness, creeps through pus-filled terrifying entities. They spread chaos and decay in terrible ways, blowing a clarion call for awakening in a very destructive slime...
Hardcore metal taught by the University
Lucas Korte is a professional illustrator, artist and educator living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He holds a bachelor's degree in biological sciences from Wayne State University and a master's degree in fine arts from the University of Notre Dame, and taught painting at the University of Notre Dame for seven years as a visiting professor.
However, what you might not expect is that he is not only a member of the hardcore metal band Invested Religion, but also the principal aesthetic consultant of many rock bands around the world today, and the covers of many albums of Fetid Zombie, Universally Estranged, Stench Collector and other bands are his masterpieces. In the world of underground music, people prefer to call him Shogoth Kinetics Chinese. Hughes was a creature in the Cthulhu myth created by the American novelist Howard Philip Lovecraft).
Between university professors and hardcore metals, Lucas found the best fit. He often presents his work in class and is willing to expose his students to as many challenging art forms as possible. Although these works are extremely niche and far from the popular culture of university campuses, in Lucas's teaching philosophy, art should not be a quagmire of conformist ideas, and active curiosity is the source of inspiration for creation.
When students enter my classroom, they usually have a very narrow understanding of what art is and what is acceptable form. I like to show them works that are beyond their perception, watch their pupils widen, and in the process gradually form their independent aesthetic ideas.
—Lucas Korte
A tribute to Lovecraft, a tribute to cosmic non-humanism
Growing up like drawing monsters and becoming obsessed with rock album cover illustrations, starting to draw hardcore rock illustrations for hardcore rock in 2000 without pay, and returning to art school in his 30s – Lucas never imagined he could be a true artist in his childhood and early in his career. Since beginning to read Lovecraft's horror science fiction novels and gradually collaborating with several metal bands, Lucas's artistic creation has begun to show a rhythm that makes him happy, and at that time, he also clearly feels that a life that can make him fully engaged is embracing him.
Lovecraft was the first thinker I met who saw nature as alien to human experience. This means that in his cosmology, man's traditional philosophical or spiritual conception of the universe will eventually become a superficial projection of a stranger and more difficult to understand reality.
In a sense, Lovecraft's extraterrestrial cosmology is a system that is extremely incompatible with the human view of the universe, which is completely independent of human thought, and the human vision in it is also extremely limited. Based on this, Lovecraft created an aesthetically appealing non-human universe or non-human nature. And when Lucas first read his work, his fascinating fictional universe truly became a powerful driving force for his artistic inspiration.
I am actually more interested in His cosmic non-humanism than Lovecraft's cosmic pessimism. As a writer, the intense visual sense created by his work is a treat for anyone who wants to paint monsters and alien gods.
The eternal mixture behind the ecological horror
Thanks to his professional background in biology, Lucas's creative interests focus on "the weirder and more obscure side of the universe and life" and tend to see everything he creates as an ecological horror. Based on the biological concept of "material exchange, energy exchange", Lucas attempts to interpret in his work the underlying idea that the boundaries between things flow arbitrarily, find the right metaphor to explore the universe, and use the visual language of horror aesthetics to embrace the universe, even if it is sticky, even if it is dirty, it can still be fascinating.
During his Master of Fine Arts studies, Lucas was exposed to speculative realism and New Materialism. The former seeks to understand the universe from a non-human perspective in search of a way out of anthropocentrism, while the latter advocates thinking about everything in the form of matter in order to eliminate the hierarchy of people classifying the universe.
Two ideas influenced Lucas's work to some extent, and in many ways reshaped his view of the universe and art. By integrating these ideas, terror, decay, and chaos can also produce extraordinary images with the blessing of metal music.
Lucas Korte
Terror may make us accustomed to the appearance it reflects, but it is more likely to give us the courage to explore the truth. In the case of ecological terror, humans are a temporary part of a larger ecological network. We will eventually decay and return our materiality to the universe. There is no true purity, only mixing, infinite continuous mixing...
Eye Edge Art Chronicles Part 874 is an artistic gift dedicated to life.
Text Writing: Eye Edge Art Zhi
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