Weird Tales 359. Conrad Williams
Brothers-like sculptures!
WT: Does music influence your work?
RAK: I am a big music fan and always listen to it in the studio. It helps me go to the “other” place where my mind needs to be in order to work. The rhythm helps me keep motivated. I listen to a lot of different kinds of music, but when I am really focused on a drawing, I like strange abstract electronic music that takes unpredictable turns. Lately I have been listening to Seefeel, Black Dog, Vex’d, Blackfilm, Autechre, Hecq, and, of course, The Residents. On the other hand, I like Kathleen Edwards, Fleet Foxes, and Muse. The main thing with any creative environment for me is to establish a space, however fleeting, where the “otherness” that resides in my drawings can exist with minimal interruption. I’ve never been someone who is inclined to whip out a sketchbook on a bus and start drawing. Music helps creates a nice creative bubble.
WT: In addition to being a visual artist, you are also a writer. How do these two different forms of artistic expression influence each other in your work? Which comes first when illustrating your own work?
RAK: Umberto Eco writes that he begins each novel with a seminal image. That idea resonated with me because it is also how I approach my writing. For example, with my novella, The Lost Machine, I had the image of a man standing before a large block-like prison in the middle of nowhere. His head was wrapped in cloth and he had stones floating around him. Obviously the image is just a starting point, but it was enough to unpack the whole story. The process is very similar for both image making and art. I begin with an image, and then begin building that image out from the center. My drawing “The Seed,” is about this process. Imagine that the seminal idea is something super dense that keeps pushing more and more information out. When I can feel that creative surge, I know I am on to something. When I am writing, I am always thinking in terms of images. It is very cinematic in a sense. I do have to keep a leash on things or I can spend three pages describing the rust on a padlock. In terms of process, when illustrating my own writing, I do the writing first, and then the finished illustrations. Until that point most of the images are in my mind though and there is constant interaction.
WT: A lot of your work is influenced by nature. What is it about the natural world that intrigues you?
RAK: There are certain places where I can feel myself relax, bookstores and libraries fall into this category, and so do gardens. It is just a place I love to be because thoughts and ideas seem to come easily there. The forms of plants and creatures are endlessly inspiring. We’ve never used insecticides or herbicides so the insect life in our garden is very rich and the plants tend to get a little overgrown. Of course the garden conjures up a sense of childhood and magic. All these things are very good for an artist with my interests. Although I know to a certain extent it is an illusion—a garden is a human invention—the magic of it is that it feels like it is outside of human concerns. It is a respite from the relentlessly mediated systems and structures outside of the garden. I would love to write a book on the garden in literature and art. There are so many great ones, from Mary Norton’s The Borrowers series to “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
WT: What was one of the most frustrating projects you worked on and why? What was the most exciting project?
RAK: Well I have to say the most frustrating project was a book cover for a publisher who shall remain nameless. I did a beautiful monochromatic oil painting, which was approved at every stage and then rejected for no good reason on delivery. I was mostly disappointed because I knew in my heart that it was a cool piece. In the end I sold it for a very satisfactory sum to a woman who had never even read the book. My most exciting project to date, wow, that is a really tough one. I think I would have to say the album cover work I did for Korn. Of course it was great to work with the band, but really it is just about having a great memory of being at home in my studio in the summer, with the windows open, my dog in the studio and my wife and daughter doing their own creative things nearby. I was feeling really energized. It is great when that happens.
WT: Although most of your work is quite dark, it’s also very beautiful. How do you find beauty in the grotesque?
RAK: That is a very interesting question and goes to the heart of what we consider beautiful or grotesque. Is something inherently grotesque/ beautiful, or is it something that we construct? I think the latter. When I’m working on an image I try to find and reveal the heart of what I am depicting so that the viewer can feel a connection. Sometimes that relationship is based on humor or absurdity, other times through contemplation, or a mood such as sadness and melancholy. I want the viewer to feel something of themselves in the subject. By disrupting the ordinary I try to guide the viewer into an unexpected relationship with the image.
Notions of the grotesque are rooted in a fear of disorder, things not as they should be. Beauty lives there too; all true beauty has a flaw. My favorite quotation is “there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion” by Frances Bacon. My artistic production is centered on finding that liminal space between the two, where you can feel the beautiful and grotesque as a simultaneous thing.
In terms of technique, I like to render subjects in a way that privileges composition, balance, beautiful line and unhurried execution. I never create original art on the computer. That is not to denigrate the efforts of other artists that do, I simply feel that you use another deeper part of your brain when you are making the marks with your hands. I think most viewers will take the time to look and spend time with your image, if they see that you are engaging them aesthetically and honestly.
WT: What’s next for you? What are you looking forward to?
RAK: In the short term I’m working on a number of book projects. I’m doing thirty illustrations for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Clive Barker’s Weaveworld, and an early Barker novella called Candle in the Cloud. I’m also doing a book project with Jeff VanderMeer where I will produce illustrations inspired by his Ambergris universe and then he will write short fiction riffing off the art.
In addition, I am writing and illustrating a novel called Necessary Monsters, which is a follow-up to an earlier work The Lost Machine. I want to do a lot more writing. It is an area that I am creatively drawn to and the process of designing and creating books is very interesting. My wife and I started Radiolaria Studios in 2010, which will produce interesting small run books based on my art (we did The Lost Machine in 2010). And eventually I would like to secure a literary agent and sell a novel to a commercial house in order to engage a broader readership.
One the visual art side of things, I am going to be creating some larger works for a gallery show, and produce an art book. I am looking forward to being the artist guest of honor at the 2012 World Fantasy Convention in Toronto. It seems like something new is always popping up, and so I have to say I am looking forward to the unknown!
IN TERROR SITS THE BLACK-HAIRED BRIDE, by Michael Skeet
A TOUR OF WEIRD MUSIC
Weird is both emotion and sensation. It’s the realization—the more abrupt the better—that your understanding of the world is completely wrong, and the unsettling sensation of your guts trying to coil themselves around your spinal column when that realization hits you.
We are familiar with the weird in fiction but we also dine at a vast buffet of other weird media. If one looks at fiction and film as platters of weirdness, allow me to suggest that weird music is the equivalent of tapas or dim sum: small bites of something that get inside, twist you around, and are gone again before you’ve had a chance to fully digest their meanings.
Because of the bite-size nature of popular music—and because a steady diet of weird music loses its effectiveness in a way that doesn’t apply so much to other media—music has different “weirdness requirements” than those of literature or film. In the case of fiction, at least, we tend to know going in whether or not something is weird, and the pleasure comes from the way the author satisfies our expectations—including the ones we didn’t know we had. In the case of music, though, the less we expect it, the more effectively weird a song is.
A song that makes its case from the opening words and doesn’t vary its lyrical tone at all can’t really be called weird, because the element of surprise