painting – Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher

Ad for A Tale of Hell — New ad created August 19, 2020.

As I mentioned yesterday, four of my flash horror stories I have been accepted for publication in Ezine 51. The publishers have also offered to run a full-page ad in the issue for a very reasonable $10. I have submitted the ad shown. Let me know what you think of it. I will use it again as the opportunity arises.

Sirens Call required that the ad be 1100 px x 850. This did permit me to use only the painting, because the text would cover too much of it. Therefore I shrunk the painting down on Pixlr E and filled the background with black so that the painting would appear to be coming out of the darkness, which is appropriate for Hell. It’s like you are looking through the smoke and darkness to see the fight. It also allows all the other colors to appear bright.

The most important text was the book title, particularly “A Tale of Hell” since that carries the most impact and with the painting conveys in an instant the most important emotions and archetypal ideas the book conveys. So I made that the biggest text in white to stand out the most against a dark background. I was trying to give the ad a three-dimensional feel. Then of course I put the remainder of the title in white but smaller. I lined it up so that it didn’t cover the faces of the figures behind it. This also gives the title a feel of hanging out in the air as you watch the fight and the people and demon behind it. People’s vision and attention key on faces, so it’s important not to cover those.

The next most important text I put in yellow.

I put my own name in red and rather small, so that it doesn’t detract from the fight, but is still well visible yet almost blends into the background.

I used Pixlr E to make the ad and chose the fonts from there. I wanted the title to pop out like a movie title and to have a feel that it might be used on a sign in Hell so I chose a font that is more formal, something that looks like it was made by a professional. For the yellow text I chose something that would look like it might be found scrawled on a wall in Hell. Not using the same font as I did for the title makes it stand out more from the rest of the text. I chose a simple, narrow font for my name, so that it would stand out from the other text, yet it would be quite legible.

I found out just now that Siren’s Call accepted the ad. It will run in their Fall/Halloween issue.

Many heartfelt thanks to Siren’s Call for both publishing my works and my ad.

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch Museo del Prado, Madrid — The Garden of Earthly Delights
by Hieronymus Bosch
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Long before I developed an interest in the literature of horror, I developed an interest in painting (though I am not much of a painter myself). One of the painters who has always fascinated me is Hieronymus Bosch, a Dutch painter who lived from circa 1450 to 1516. The work above is typical of his style: surreal, fantastic, horrible. Bosch did many paintings of the horrors of hell as a consequence of sin.

Earlier tonight, I was searching for a subject for tonight’s quick post and I did a quick search in Google images for “horror art” thinking I would post some modern visual image of horror that captures what horror is for me. However, most of the images I found relied solely on the shock value of some singular instance of torment to communicate horror: the visual equivalent of a slasher flick. With one exception (which I did not post here tonight, but maybe will later) nothing captured the suspense that I feel is necessary in a work of horror.

Then I remembered Hieronymus Bosch.

Although I cannot say there is any inherent suspense in Bosch’s works, there are other, hard to verbalize, elements that seem to speak horror to me better than any depiction of a single, bloody act. One is the breadth of horror in his works. There is no single act, instead there may be a hundred or more monsters and terrifying horrors in a single painting, raising the horror from a personal one-on-one level with the viewer to that of a awe-inspiring spectacle. Second, there is a tremendous level of complexity in each work, which forces the viewer to examine the work in detail to dig out each individual torment and focus on it, thereby immersing the viewer in the infernal landscape as if he were a participant in it. Third, I sense a mystery in Bosch’s works that is hard to express. There is an extremely complex symbolism in each work, that I personally cannot fathom, but that intrigues me nonetheless, perhaps because I cannot fathom it. Perhaps an expert in symbols, such as the fictitious Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code, could understand the motifs at work in Bosch’s painting, but I can only catch a glimpse of something occasionally and realize that something well beyond my limited understanding is. To paraphrase the comedian Adam Carolla, I feel like “a baboon trying to understand a thesaurus.”

If you have an interest in the visual art of horror, please do a quick search on Google images for “Hieronymus Bosch”. You won’t be disappointed.

Thoughts? Comments?