Three Brides

My portrayal of the 'three brides' of Dracula in Bram Stoker's narrative. What are we to make of these exotic creatures? They seem more like elaborate dolls than anything human. Perhaps this indeed is the case for these three who have abandoned their humanity in favour of a hollow moonlit immortality.

Words of Warning

"I could hear a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for there were many nationalities in the crowd, so I quietly got my polyglot dictionary from my bag and looked them out. I must say they were not cheering to me, for amongst them were “Ordog”—Satan, “Pokol”—hell, “stregoica”—witch, “vrolok” and “vlkoslak”—both mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other Servian for something that is either werewolf or vampire."

~ From Jonathan Harker’s journal, as related in Bram Stoker's Dracula. This astonishing five-horned skull actually exists: I photographed it as a specimen of a fossil deer in Naturalis Museum in Leiden, then added even more horns for effect. Apparently one can never have too many horns when portraying these darker forces.

Dracula

It has become something of a tradition to assume that Bram Stoker’s inspiration for the character of Dracula stemmed from the exploits of the 15th-century Romanian tyrant Vlad Țepeș - Vlad the Impaler. I disagree, and instead have come to conclude that the true origins of the character lay much closer to home for Stoker, and with an individual who dominated his own life: his overbearing employer, the despotic actor-manager Sir Henry Irving, for whom Stoker worked for 27 years, and whom Stoker seems to have both loathed and revered. Stoker even asked the charismatic Irving to portray Dracula on the stage – a role which Irving, perhaps aware of how much of himself had been written into the character, consistently declined. In my 'portrait' of the Count Stoker’s wish has at last been fulfilled: it is the features of Irving himself which form the basis for my own Dracula.

Does an imagined portrait of the notorious Count really need a heavy emphasis on blood and fangs? Not to me. Horror is in suggestion: in what you think you see, rather than in literal detail, and menace and dark charisma can be as much in the eyes as in more obvious attributes. And there is no actual 'blood' anywhere here: what you see is merely an overlay of brushstrokes.

Lucy Westenra

Where lies the true horror? In the story of Bram Stoker’s Dracula we tend to think of the horror of blood and vampire fangs. Such things are the thrill of 19th-century sensational melodrama, but what makes such gothic classics endure is the way in which they tug us towards deeper truths that we all at some level recognize, and we recognize them because they somewhere lie within our own personal experience. 

In Stoker’s narrative it is the events which occur both to and around Lucy Westenra that form a pivotal focus in the story. In spite of the heroic efforts of the Dutch vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing to prevent the encounter, Lucy is stalked and bitten by Dracula. She wastes away and apparently dies, but her coffin is later discovered to be empty. Lucy has become one of the ‘Un-Dead’; has herself become a vampire.

It is the true horror of possession, of desiring total mastery over another, which we recognize. Lucy is no longer ‘Lucy’. She becomes a sad walking puppet, a thing of unnatural desires neither living nor truly dead. We ourselves perhaps know of someone in our own circle of acquaintances whom we feel has been ‘taken over’ by another, who has become so compliant to the will of that other person that they adopt that person’s mannerisms, figures of speech, ways of dressing, view of things. Just think of the many religious cults and the way in which they maintain their members. Vampirism of the mind is still vampirism, and the legions of these particular 'undead' are real enough.

My video of Dracula featuring this painting of Lucy can be viewed on YouTube here: Dracula: Darkness Rising.

The Ancient Mariner

Surely the most Gothic poem outside the works of Poe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's extended masterpiece The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is uncompromising in its bleakness of vision, and in the force with which it carries the reader along with it on the mariner's dark voyage. The death of the albatross at the hand of the unnamed mariner which precipitates the curse upon him, the series of nightmare visions and supernatural occurrences, and the blessed moments of brief redemption, live on in the mind long after the poem has been read.

Certain phrases from the poem - 'All in a hot and copper sky', and 'Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink' - have become well-known enough to enter the language, and the poem's central image of the mariner burdened with the slain bird hung around his neck has become idiomatically descriptive of any difficulty that refuses to leave us.

My painting began life as a  piece of commissioned art in oils for Penguin Books. Much later, dissatisfied with the changes to the art that were requested of me at the time and my own treatment of the subject, I extensively repainted it as the version which you see here. What perhaps is often overlooked is that the mariner is 'ancient' at the time that he is narrating the poem, not at the time that he made the voyage - which is why I have chosen to portray him, not grizzle-bearded, but rather in middle age.

The Phantom of the Opera

The despair of love that not only is unrequited, but always will remain so. In the fairy story, it is Beauty who redeems the Beast through her unconditional love. But the profound horror in Gaston Leroux's story stems from the fact that there is no redemption. The score of La Traviata and the roof of the Paris Opera House form the background.

When my cover art for this title was originally published I received a charming letter from the president of the British Phantom Appreciation Society (no, I did not know that there was one either) praising the accuracy of my portrayal of Erik in its fidelity to Leroux's original text. Even the glowing eyes, which seem almost melodramatically supernatural, are exactly as Leroux describes them. Others have told me that they sense a touching sympathy in my 'portrait' of Erik. If that is so, then perhaps this tragic character has found some measure of redemption after all. You can read a full account of my creation of this painting on The Phantom of the Opera.

The Masque of the Red Death

Edgar Allan Poe's gruesome character embodies all the ills of the ages. Really the character is a continuance of the traditional dance of death theme which has endured since medieval times. King or commoner, pope or peasant: worldly status leaves Death distinctly underwhelmed. Death, the corrupter of all flesh, is himself beyond corruption in the other sense as well. You might be filthy rich, and you can throw all the cash you have in his direction. Death cannot be bought off, and he'll take you anyway when it suits him. Bribery is not in Death's dictionary. The background of my painting incorporates a signed letter of Poe's superimposed upon a passage from the original story, and - of course - Poe's trademark raven.

The central character here is actually an oil painting for which my eldest son was the obliging model, transformed beyond all recognition beneath a thick layer of flour-and-water paste, which I then crackle-dried before applying a further layer of acrylic paint. He enjoyed the whole process even more than I enjoyed plastering the pasty goo onto his face.

Frankenstein

For me, the true horror of this story is not the creature created by Frankenstein, but the unrelenting, remorseless tragedy of the unfolding events. Reading Mary Shelley's narrative is like being on a speeding train that you know is going to crash, but which you cannot get off. One thing that her protagonist Victor Frankenstein and I share, however, is a fondness for the works of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and I have here incorporated the title page of his Occult Philosophy into my image. Agrippa's writings had a huge impact on 16th-century Europe. Albrecht Dürer was impressed enough by them to include one of Agrippa's illustrations - the magic square of Jupiter - in his masterpiece engraving Melencolia 1. Agrippa found a new audience with the 19th-century Romantics, and I feel the sonority of all that history when I open the pages of the hefty volume of his collected works that is on my own bookshelf.

The central image of the creature is my own oil painting, with Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical studies and Robert Fludd's universal human proportions also included.

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