William Basso

William Basso is a contamporary artist. Combining equal amounts of horror movie magazines and comic books with Renaissance or Eastern European art, for example, helped to shape Bill's artistic sensibilities. He talks about his work in his bio:

My work is a combination of various artistic disciplines including drawing, sculpture, photography, collage and painting. Used together, these allow me to create images of mystery, wonder, delight, sorrow and fear, which often take place in intimate stage-like settings.

The characters in my work exist in a distant, half-remembered, autumnal place where even Halloween can last forever. Images emerge through a cross-referencing of many artistic influences, memories and ideas. Ancient and flickering, monochrome films of the fantastic and macabre play continuously, running through rusted projectors. Long, silent corridors are hung with varnished, cracked paintings and brittle prints from another age, while rows of tall, wooden cabinets display bones and other arcane specimens behind panes of misted glass.

Although my work is photographically based, I would classify it as a form of mixed-media. I typically begin a piece by drawing and working out ideas on paper. This is followed by sculpting and constructing a series of miniature, doll-like characters or maquettes, as well as a variety of intricate handmade objects that are then photographed. These objects and constructions are made from all kinds of things like clay, cardboard, string, paper, wire, tape, wood, hair and odd bits of cloth. The photographs are processed in the computer.

As I'm working, it can feel as though I'm staging a tiny theater piece or perhaps curating a mysterious museum exhibit combined with a long ago forgotten sideshow of curiosities.

VISIT HIS SITE for more of his works

Lovis Corinth, Totentanz

Lovis Corinth (1858 – 1925) was a German painter and printmaker whose mature work realized a synthesis of impressionism and expressionism.

Self portrait with skeleton (1896)

It's a kind of mememto mori but without the mystification and dark and dramatic appearance of Death as alive and active figure as it happens in many memento mori paintings. The skeleton here is a suspended lifeless object of anatomy lessons and the whole picture with the vivid colours, sunlight, the city behind and the cool mood of the painter shows death as a natural process. Probably the painter felt death as someting distant. But after his stroke in 1911 and the WW I, his depictions of Death became a dark, gloomy and threatening shadow figure as we see in his 1922 "Totentanz" etchings: In six scenes, Corinth showed in this work Death and its effect on people:

Death and the pair

Death and artist

Death and youth

Dealing with the skeleton is playful, the boy is neither timid nor desperate, but seems to be only interested in the skeleton. The skeleton itself looks less like death, but rather as a model for anatomical study and thus provides a parallel to the 1896 self-portrait with skeleton. The bright display of etching is in contrast to all other images of the portfolio and underlines the recklessness of the scene as well.

Death and oldman

Death and wife

Death at Strucks (name of a friendy coulpe)

Maurice Heesen, Muerto Feliz

Maurice Heesen has produced a series of gore photos where the bodies, no matter their bloodbath, they passed smiling with happy faces. As se stated for these photos: We only fear death because we don’t know what is there. It’s better to keep laughing in life until we meet death.

Ilyas Phaizulline

King-Plague

Ilyas Phaizulline (1950 -) is an artist from Russia. He is a painter and drawer. He lives in Kazan. After finishing a musical-art-pedagogical secondary school in 1970, he attended the IE Repin State Academic Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in St. Petersburg . Phaizulline lives and works from the city of Kazan, Russia where some of his works are permanently displayed in the National Museum of Tatarstan Republic. His art is principally that of a classical realist and maintain the same techniques and standards of the Old Masters and mentors such as Velasquez, Da Vinci, and Michelangelo. In this gallery, you will find more than one hundred representations of work from his early period until the present. Artworks by Ilyas Phaizulline can be found in private collections of Spain , Italy and England . Some of his historical artworks were purchased by the Russian Ministry of Culture for exposition in the National Museum of Tatarstan Republic. Several paintings were purchased for the Kazan Kremlin . Visit his SITE  for more of his works

Mask of the Red Death

Despair

Still Life with skulls

Still LIfe with Skulls

Vanitas

Vanitas

Inquisition

Hellmouth and Satan represantation in medieval paintings

The Hours of Catherine of Cleves  1440

Hellmouth is the entrance to Hell envisaged as the gaping mouth of a huge monster, an image which first appears in Anglo-Saxon art, and then spread all over Europe, remaining very common in depictions of the Last Judgment and Harrowing of Hell until the end of the Middle Ages, and still sometimes used during the Renaissance and after. It enjoyed something of a revival in polemical popular prints after the Protestant Reformation, when figures from the opposite side would be shown disappearing into the mouth. A notable late appearance is in the two versions of a painting by El Greco of about 1578. Political cartoons still showed Napoleon leading his troops into one. Medieval theatre often had a hellmouth prop or mechanical device which was used to attempt to scare the audience by vividly dramatizing an entrance to Hell.

The Hours of Catherine of Cleves  1440

The Hours of Catherine of Cleves  1440

Taddeo di Bartolo (1396)

St. Augustine's manuscript De civitate Dei libri XXII (The city of God), 412-426

14th century Bolognese painting

The oldest example of an animal Hellmouth known to Meyer Schapiro was an ivory carving of c. 800 in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and he says most examples before the 12th century are English. Many show the Harrowing of Hell, which appealed to Anglo-Saxon taste, as a successful military raid by Christ. Schapiro speculates that the image may have drawn from the pagan myth of the Crack of Doom, with the mouth that of the wolf-monster Fenrir, slain by Vidar, who is used as a symbol of Christ on the Gosforth Cross and other pieces of Anglo-Scandinavian art. In the assimilation of Christianised Viking populations in northern England, the Church was surprisingly ready to allow the association of pagan mythological images with Christian ones, in hogback grave markers for example. In the Anglo-Saxon Vercelli Homilies (4:46-8) Satan is likened to a dragon swallowing the damned

Fra Angelico 1435-1440

Fra Angelico 1431

The whale-monster Leviathan has been equated with this description, although this is hard to confirm in the earliest appearances. However in The Whale, an Old English poem from the Exeter Book, the mouth of Hell is compared to a whale's mouth, though somewhat indirectly: The whale has another trick: when he is hungry, he opens his mouth and a sweet smell comes out. The fish are tricked by the smell and they enter into his mouth. Suddenly the whale’s jaws close. Likewise, any man who lets himself be tricked by a sweet smell and led to sin will go into hell, opened by the devil — if he has followed the pleasures of the body and not those of the spirit. When the devil has brought them to hell, he clashes together the jaws, the gates of hell. No one can get out from them, just as no fish can escape from the mouth of the whale.

Codex Gigas 13th cent

Master of the Parlament de Paris, , France

Giovanni da Modena (ca. 1410)

Book of Revelation 1430-1440

Satan himself is often shown sitting in Hell eating the damned, but according to G.D. Schmidt this is a separate image, and the Hellmouth should not be considered to be the mouth of Satan, although Hofmann is inclined to disagree with this. Equally the Hellmouth never bites the damned, remaining wide open, ready for more.

icon in Gelati monastery

"Smash the Control Machine" by Otep (2009)