Basil Gogos is a master of monsters.

I tend to think of him as a post-pulp pulp artist. He got to paint wonderfully lurid illustrations of famous movie monsters years after the high-period for pulp art had closed.

His delightfully ghastly portraits of Dracula, The Mummy, The Phantom of the Opera, The Metaluna Mutant, The Wolf Man and dozens of other creatures that crawled out of Hollywood’s “B” movie dungeons in the middle of the 20th Century graced the covers of issue after issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland. Not the least of them was Frankenstein’s monster, who Gogos portrayed numerous times and in a multitude of approaches, from horrific to sympathetic.

Famous Monsters of Filmland was edited by monster expert extraordinaire Forrest J. Ackerman and published by James Warren. Warren also published Creepy and Eerie, black and white comics magazines that featured some of amazing artists like Al Williamson, Wally Wood, Berni Wrightson, Alex Toth and others. Gogos did covers for some of those and a range of other magazines as well.

Gogos studied at The National School of Design, The School of Visual Arts and the Art Students League of New York, where he studied under the renowned illustrator and teacher Frank J. Reilly.

Gogo’s monster images are foot-off-the-brakes, no-color-barred excursions into monsteriffic sensationalism, with wonderful spooky spotlighting, eerie backlighting and great blocks of shadow defining the forms. Glaring colors wash over the looming faces like intense stage lighting, and the characters jump out at you as if screaming “Kid, you better buy this magazine if you want to see more cool stuff like this!”. Wonderful.

Gogos’ creepy creations and eerie evocations of monsters made famous in films have been collected in a new book, Famous Monster Movie Art of Basil Gogos, edited by illustrator Kerry Gammil and J. David Spurlok and with an foreword by Rob Zombie. (Gogos also did some album covers for Rob Zombie, The Misfits and Electric Frankenstein.)

The official Basil Gogos site is pretty minimal and the images are small, there are some larger ones in this page on Gathering Darkness.

Enjoy them…, if you dare!

Addendum, May 19, 2010: Unfortunately, the BasilGogos.com site is now gone. I don’t know of a replacement.

Kinuko Y. Craft takes inspiration from many strata of the history of art and weaves them together into her own intricate and varied images of fantasy worlds; and isn’t afraid to let the threads keep their connection to the original sources of inspiration.

Looking through a gallery of her work, you’ll find a fascinating display of her interest in the styles and techniques of the Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists, Da Vinci and other Renaissance painters, Baroque portraits, the Orientalists, 19th Century Academics and some of the great Golden Age illustrators who took inspiration in many of the same sources.

At times she will playfully create a homage to a particular artist or period style, at other times she can fascinatingly intertwine several seemingly disparate sources into an uncanny whole (Henri Roussau and Titian in the same image for example).

Craft is well known as a fantasy oriented illustrator and her clients include National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, Forbes, The New York Times, and Atlantic Monthly in addition to numerous publishers and commercial accounts. She has received multiple Gold and Silver Medals from the Society of Illustrators, and several Chesley Awards.

Craft has transitioned away from the demands of editorial illustration and now concentrates on her own themes, and has a successful line of reproductions and art prints that have a wide following. I believe she also continues to work on a line of children’s books in which classic fairy tales like Cinderella, King Midas and Sleeping Beauty are retold.

Her approach varies from elaborate panoramas on which she has lavished intricate detail, to quiet and emotionally focused images of single subjects, with colors alternately subdued or intense.

The image gallery on her site is unfortunately not as extensive as you might like, but it is still a fascinating stroll through not only her own fertile imagination, but also through her fascinations with great artists of the past.