Barlowe's Inferno

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Hunted for their skins and their usefulness as war-beasts, many Abyssals evoke an attitude of savage respect from the demons, while, for their part, the more intelligent of the Abyssals keep their distance, understanding the innate superiority of the new-comers. For a very long time now I have been relatively skeptical about the ability of any computer rendering program to emulate the personal handwriting of an artist.

Tanith Lee, September 19, 1947 - May 24, 2015 Tanith Lee was born on September 19, 1947 in London, England, the daughter of ballroom dancers. There have been so many “evil” buildings rendered in paintings and for film that I was consciously trying not repeat anything I’d seen before. This is a must for any aspiring artist or individual seeking inspiration of the macabre and brimstone laden sort. These are works reminiscent of painter John Martin, whose own vistas of Hell hang in the world's finest museums. A tangle of streets beyond count, the city’s arteries are clogged with work-gangs of souls and demons of every description.The inspiration for this painting is fairly obvious: all of those great Flemish paintings of medical examinations, of doctors gathered around splayed-out corpses. What Remains – (unpublished – acrylic on Gessoboard) – As much as Hell is a place of unrelenting horror and savagery it is, too, a place of sadness. This digital paint-sketch was created after I spent some serious time with the Painter program on Paradise Lost.

And what more poignant, precious reminder of its former existence could it possess after its Fall than one of its own charred feathers? For a variety of reasons I’d rather not elaborate upon here, I decided to separate this entity visually from all of the other demons in Hell and go with a somewhat more abstract form. While this painting represents a semi-intelligent individual, there must be countless Abyssals that are mere animals. The only solution that satisfied my world’s internal logic was to riff on the concept behind Agares’ steed as depicted in the INFERNO book.

I decided to transform them into the indigenous peoples of Hell, there long before the demons Fell and the Inferno was populated by the damned. Demolishers – (acrylic on Gessoboard) – Part of the vanguard of Dis’ army is its intimidating force of various engineering “vehicles”. Wayne Barlowe shows once again that he is a master world architect, fusing an almost alien creative vision with unparalleled technical artistic skills to grant us a glimpse of the helpless horror and crushing majesty of the Inferno.

Sargatanas Descending – (from Barlowe’s Inferno – acrylic on ragboard) – Like all Demons Major, Sargatanas is a metamorphic being. His idiosyncratic style is still fresh and captivating and this painting is something of an homage to him.The devil is in the details and it took quite some time to work out all of the motifs from a design standpoint. In 1971, Macmillan published "The Dragon Hoard," another children's book, which was followed by "Animal Castle" and "Princess Hynchatti and Other Stories" in 1972. The Examination – (from Barlowe’s Inferno – acrylic on ragboard) – While souls are treated as a resource by demons in an unthinkable number of ways in Hell, a true understanding of them as once-living organisms on a physical level is absent.

So heavy that they need supernatural augmentation to move, they are lumbering, building-crushing tanks capable of chewing their way through soul-bricks and natural stone alike.While most buildings in Dis are composed entirely of soul-bricks, the Wargate was erected around a natural volcanic plug, its outer surfaces smoothed by slave labor that took eons and countless souls to complete. Consider that it is much more fascinating from an artist's point of view to explore the dark rather than the light, even though we depend on the light to do our work! The's something inherently sacred to us about the human form, and Barlowe has a real knack for twisting that form around.