Lovecraftian drawings

These drawings are a small homage to the work of H P Lovecraft (1890-1937), whose weird horror stories have fascinated me since I was a teenager. I say ‘small’ because there is a long tradition of illustration inspired by Lovecraft’s themes—from the 1920s to the present—that I make no grand claim to have appropriated.


The fascination of Lovecraft is his pessimistic quest for the unfathomable and the unseen. His writings convey the overwhelming sense that human life—indeed human consciousness—is merely a cruel accident of evolution, and that the world around us not only has no overarching purpose or meaning but would easily destroy us. The ancient ones: the giant, rotting, squidlike forms that dreamed our cosmos into existence, are so incomprehensible in their monstrosity that to merely contemplate them would drive a normal person to madness. Though the world appears stable and predictable, it is a mere clod at the threshold of a much darker, murkier realm that hovers mercifully beyond the reach of our perception and understanding. It is this sense of standing at the precipice (and not yet crossing – for how could you?) which charges Lovecraft’s stories with a special, eerie quality. So with all of this at the front of my mind, I drew these monsters, which are an exercise in sheer self-indulgence.