f666 zine snippet: Interview with Karlynn Holland

The Artist Behind The Cover with Karlynn Holland

Krallice's Dimensional Bleedthrough


This is the rest of the interview with Karlynn Holland that didn't fit to print in the first issue of the zine, which you should of bought by now.


How did the concept for the cover come together and did it take time, or was it something that was sparked from existing work?

The CD version of the album artwork for Dimensional Bleedthrough came first. Nick is a talented collage artist and has done some rather amazing artwork in his life in addition to being a flourishing bass player. I attached a picture of one of his works. He says it's a boat with oars. I say it's a pinned vagina. Either way, I adore it and still to this day wonder at exactly how he made it. So anyway, he made the cover, thinking of it as a digital collage. He scanned all kinds of source material, taking a rounded part here and a wing there and making the figure in the foreground, referred to by the band as Mr. Dimensional. (Goofballs.) The background is a detail from one of Goya's black paintings, Procession of the Holy Office. Nick sampled the sky and edge of the mountain from the left side of the painting. My contributions to this version of the artwork are the logo and the mouth of Mr. Dimensional. Nick wanted to use the mouth of the figure from a Francis Bacon painting, Figure Study II, but being the neurotic perfectionist that he is, he was worried over copyright issues should anyone recognize where the mouth was copied from. So he asked me to make a study of the open mouth, which I did in colored pencil and we scanned and used my drawing instead of digitally sampling from a protected published image.

These two drawings were wonderful work to do. Studying from masters is not something I do nearly enough of. In both cases it brought me much closer to the original works themselves, sharpening my eye to the finer details and techniques employed to create their apparitional compositions. The study of the mouth from the Bacon painting took a day or two. The drawing from the Goya painting took much longer mostly because it was a much larger drawing, as large as a vinyl gatefold. I worked on it for a couple days across about a month. If I had worked on it straight through, it probably would have taken about a week.

You mention the cover was an expanded detail of a Goya painting. Which of this Old Master’s painting does it come from? Why this specific detail, and what medium did you go with?

The detail from "Procession of the Holy Office" was scanned from a rather small reproduction in a book and while the scan was large enough to cover a CD tray, it was not large enough to sheath the vinyl. The actual dots from the printed image started to show up when we made the scan vinyl sized. We tried rescanning and blurring the image, but it just didn't work all that well. So again Nick asked me to make a study, this time large enough for vinyl. Subtle differences in how I drew or interpreted the worn and cracked surface of Goya's painting lent a warm subtly to the vinyl artwork. I'm actually surprised that more people don't notice that they are different. Most people assume the vinyl and CD cover background are the same image, but they're not. One is Goya's painting, the other is my drawing. As a final touch before printing the drawing for the vinyl release, Nick added a bit of a golden tint to the whole drawing, which was intended as a subtle reference to the cover artwork for Drudkh's album, Autumn Aurora.



The drawing itself is done in Prismacolor pencil on bristol paper.

How did you and Nick McMaster work together to bring the artwork for the vinyl come to life? What was the process like? Describe the communication between you two. Seeing that McMaster is also part of Krallice, how much input did the rest of the band have on the cover?

Nick and I had collaborated in a similar manner before on the Astomatous logo and album artwork, so working together on this was very easy. Nick knew what he wanted and he also knew what my technical capabilities were. The cover art was Nick's conception and my hand acted only to fill in where his vision expanded beyond the source material he had gathered. He was the designer, I was a technician. He used his impeccable taste to make careful selections and created as much of what he envisioned as he could, but when his vision went beyond something he could find or butted up against the legal limits of what he could sample, my hand was employed to fill in the gaps. The rest of the band saw what an awesome job he had done creating such a finely crafted composition and gave their approval.

The choice of the Forest drawing for the gatefold was made by Mick Barr. I finished that drawing around the time the vinyl release was being put together. He saw it and asked to use it.

The inside of the gatefold beautifully displays your “Black Forest” piece, it features your trademark fine line work as seen in your other pieces such as; “Sin Eater”, “Goslings Moss” and “Rudra Hunting Demons in the Forest”. Even the Dimensional Bleedthrough cover has a forest like scene going on. What effect or inspiration does nature and the outdoors have on your work? What else inspires your work?

Early on, I wanted to draw from nature and many of my favorite artists are also gifted anatomists and naturalists, including Da Vinci, Caravaggio, and Jan Van Calcar who illustrated Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body). Unlike those three, I don't seek to study nature and recreate its likeness visually. More often, I create my own nature in an attempt to build a larger visual metaphor for music or emotion. For example, I was talking to James Plotkin one day. I was listening to a lot of drone doom at the time, Black Boned Angel, Boris' The Thing Which Solomon Overlooked and of course Earth 2 Special Low Frequency Edition were in heavy rotation, and Jim gave me a copy of a Goslings/Warmth album, Heaven of Animals. It is superb and his description of it was perfect: like wrapping your ears in a black blanket of moss. I thought the image of that texture, this amourphous blob of black moss wrapped across a page, was simply irresistable. So I started drawing and as I make progress, I rescan the drawing and post it to the internet, mostly to remind myself to keep working on it.

The Sin Eaters started as practice drawings, a way to warm up my hand and pens before working on a more representational drawing like one of the demon portraits. However, after I made a few, I decided to devote an entire notebook to them and they took on a life of their own. The title for the series was inspired by Niall Scott's essay for Nicola Masciandaro's Hideous Gnosis publication. In his essay, Scott describes the medieval practice of sin eating wherein a loaf of bread symbolically absorbs the sins of the deceased and is then consumed by a member of the town, symbolically consuming the sins of the dead. I was intrigued by this antiquated communal practice and agreed with Scott that the act of looking at a work of art or hearing a band perform could become a similarly consumptive experience. Through these abstract drawings, I wanted to convey feelings of darkness that would be communally digested by everyone who participates in the act of looking. I posted a couple early versions of a few of the sin eaters to my blog, and found out that Nicola was one of my readers when he asked to publish the drawings in the Hideous Gnosis publication.

Music is obviously a huge influence on my work, one could really say the primary influence. I taught myself to draw by copying my dad’s comic books, especially Will Eisner's work for the noir comic series The Spirit. Other artists that made serious impressions on me were Gerhard Richter, Lee Bontecou, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Otto Dix, and Sally Mann. Mann’s exhibition “What Remains” as well as Sugimoto’s “Theaters” and “Seas” are delicate monuments to temporal mortality that still leave a chill in my bones and awe in my eyes.

How do you create these line driven pieces that become forests, shrubbery and even abstract logos like Astomatous’ or even Solecism’s?

For the Forests, I start with a blank piece of paper, a pencil and my eyes closed. I place wavy vertical lines at random on the page, loosely tracking perspective and depth by varying their length and spatial placement. Then I open my eyes, pick up a pen and loosely and quickly trace the pencil and start building masses of overlapping and intertwining lines. The last step is the most time consuming. I do several more refining layers in pen smoothing out the line, filling in gaps and selectively building a darkened density that become the trees, or whatever you want to call them. I think of them as being more like the hairs that line the inner ear, and the forest landscape as a kind of visual metaphor for the black metal auditory experience. The Goslings Moss drawing is much the same. The placement of the Moss is done more or less randomly, but the details of the moss, it's texture, is executed tediously. I love painstaking, time consuming drawing.



As for the Solecism and Astomatous logos... Both of these logos were designed by members of the respective bands. Allen Nelson of Solecism came to me one day and said he wanted a logo that was two circles, the interior most containing wild lines of energy and around that the letters forming the band name. The Astomatous logo was conceptualized by Nick McMaster. Nick described to me a kind of pelvic shape at the top which were made from the beginning A and ending S. Piercing this pelvic form, he wanted a dew drop shape, filled with the rest of the letters overlapping and fuzzed out in a heavier syle. In both cases, these guys had specific, unorthodox ideas and I was employed to realize their vision.

Do you use certain pens and paper? What are your artistic weapons of choice?

Weapons of choice are micron pens and Bristol paper, which is a standard archival heavy weight paper. It's a lot pricier than what you put in your printer, but it's absolutely worth it. Prismacolor pencils are always close at hand as well.

Is it all freehand?

No, my work is not all freehand. I make use of a lot of tools. I am absolutely in love with my compass and circular geometry is a lot of fun to play around with. Circles appear in a lot of places in my logos, sometimes obviously as with the Solecism and Theologian logos, and other times implicitly, like the focal center atop the tear drop shape in the Astomatous logo. All of my logos contain the words they represent, so for the most part they are not perfectly symmetrical. However, in cases where the design calls for perfect symmetry, I only draw what I need (1/2 or 1/4) of the logo and use photoshop to do the mirroring and complete the design. The vinyl monogram labels for the Krallice self title vinyl release are an example of this technique, as is 1.2.2.1.

I also employ tracing and transfering of images as well from time to time. For example, the upcoming Krallice vinyl artwork encountered a similar reproduction issue as Dimensional Bleedthrough wherein the background image is too small to be printed vinyl sized. Nick asked me to make an outline from the background of the CD artwork. I simply printed out the background image at Vinyl scale and drew on it with a pen then used Photoshop to select my drawing out from the background. One might think of tracing as cheating, but I approach my artwork in a goal oriented way. Whatever I need to do to make visible what my vision or another's vision imagines, I do. It's the final product that will ultimately have to stand up to critique. I don't use a tablet or draw directly into a computer program like illustrator. My drawings are all conceived on and exist on paper.

The vinyl’s center labels feature what seem to be sketches of the Krallice logo. Were these early sketches of what became the Krallice logo today?

These were not early sketches for the Krallice logo. The four labels for Dimensional Bleedthrough were Mr. Dimensional, my mouth study from the Francis Bacon painting and two monogram sketches intended as original labels for the DB vinyl release. These two sketches were ultimately going to be inked and photoshopped so they would stylistically match the labels for Krallice self title vinyl release. However, Nick decided that he wanted the labels to have an in progress quality to them, and asked me not to finish them. What was printed on the DB vinyl labels is more like a page from my sketchbook than a finished drawing.

If you were lucky enough to catch Krallice on their latest tour, they were selling shirts that featured an early sketch of the logo. The same version of the logo will also be on a tape release coming out later this year.

When I’m shooting photos, I’m listening to the band play and it inspires the way I shoot. When I edit my photographs, I generally listen to the bands music and it inspires the way I edit them. At anytime while working on this cover did the record play in the background? Did any music play while you created the cover? What kind of music inspires your art?

I worked on the artwork in large part while hanging out with Nick McMaster. More often that not, I would draw while he practiced, so the entire Krallice catalogue, including new songs yet to be finished and recorded, were the bulk of my background music. It was hugely inspirational. It also allowed me to ask a lot of questions, so I could recreate by hand what Nick saw in his head as closely as possible. Is it ok if I change this? What do you think of this color scheme and range? Does this area have enough detail? And so on.

What is currently in the works for you, any upcoming projects you’d like to discuss?

I'll have the Forest drawings in a group show at the New Art Center in Massachusetts this fall. The show is entitled "We Still See the Black" and was curated by Owen Rundquist, singer of Brooklyn's Trench Grinder, and Alex Demaria. Owen and Alex work together under the pseudonym Under the Same Shadow. Their work is definitely worth checking out. The show is quite the collection of artists, including work by the three of us, Seldon Hunt and many others.

Justina Villanueva is also publishing a zine soon that will feature some of my drawings. Photographs, writings and recipes from the immensely talented matriarchs of the New York metal scene, including Vanessa America, Kim Kelly, and Samantha Marble, will be included as well.

Beyond that, I'm continuing to forge ahead on new logos and album artwork. You can keep up with that on my Facebook (facebook.com/KarlynnHolland) and blog (karlhol.blogspot.com).