Satan!
Posted: March 5, 2012 Filed under: art, religion, weird 11 CommentsWhile looking for something else on the information superhighway, I found this AWESOME picture:
Who would not want to hang with such an awesome Satan dude? Anyone out there know who the artist is? I want to see more!
Checking tineye
http://www.tineye.com/search/dc935d6abb2d6ca7a747c3aa105c066eb27fb056/
did not have time to check past first page.
My conclusion so far is people love to use art without any kind of attribution.
It also appears on a Baal Zebuth album (some black metal band)
http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Baal_Zebuth/We_are_Satanas/134363
can’t tell if the band just ripped it off or commissioned it, but the album was 2006, so that tells you it is at least that old…
I just found it. 1923. Nicholas Kalmakoff
http://visionaryrevue.com/webtext3/k.gal2.html
Definitely gonna have to find out more about this guy — great stuff.
self portrait with black woman is too funky!
That is fabulous. But never mind Satan, what about his melty candle bear mates? Their eyes are seriously freaking me out right now.
yeah, and those little teddy bear ears — which just seem so wrong. Slimy tall teddy bears with tear-drop eyes. Ick!
The spider things are awesome. But why doesn’t the prince o’ darkness have any junk? I mean his crotch is the center of the frame and there’s just nothing, not even a bump or a hole … that is creepy/uncanny in its own way. I’m not sure it would be an improvement to add his junk to the picture, but still, WTF?
Mike Monaco said: “But why doesn’t the prince o’ darkness have any junk?”
If I am not mistaken, his junk appears to be the light source in the room/space/underworld. Satan’s meat is pure energy.
Those slimy bears with their creepy eyes have been following me around for a few days now. Yesterday on the bus on my way home from work they popped into my mind again and I had a mini-revelation. From now on, in my D&D games, that is what bugbears look like.
Also, in relation to the “sexless” Satan, I read this in the essay on Kalmakoff on the Visionary Revue website:
In Satan, a truly astounding work from 1923, the Lord of Darkness appears amid a myriad of strange creatures, most noticeably a coiled serpent in the foreground. The Devil’s face, like a goat’s skull, is horned and crowned with bat’s wings. Most mysteriously, he sits before a horned altar where a pyramidal flame obscures his sex.
His contemporaries recall that, while living in Petershof, Kalmakoff joined the Skoptzy movement, a Russian sect which rejected the sacraments of the Orthodox church, believing that Christ could reveal himself within the body of any faithful aspirant (Rasputin was one of the sect’s earliest adherents). A rigorous denial of the flesh was called for. Indeed, the Skoptzy saw sex as the source of all evil – to be combatted through abstinence, asceticism and, if necessary, castration. (The word Skoptzy derives from ‘castrated’).
In this context, the light obscuring the devil’s sex takes on a curious signifigance. Through the luminous fire, Kalmakoff has obscured, erased, and even ‘castrated’ the devil, who is indeed the source of sex and all its evils.
[…] week Stefan Poag posted on his art blog this tremendous, stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks image of Satan by the Russian artist Nicholas […]