Shain Erin - Artist Review*

Sorceress - Female Nude

*and genuine mystery... but I'll get to that later.

Shain Erin's Morbid Art dolls.  Where do I even begin on how amazing these are?

Since graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute with a BFA, Erin has used his sculpture skills to create terrifying figures that have been displayed in art shows around the world.  His collections have ranged from pale ghosts reminiscent of Victorian poppets, to small withered mummies swaddled tightly in their fetishistic bindings.  Erin boldly delves into grotequerie and monster-making, pushing the boundaries of what a "doll" is and can be.

In the bio from Erin's wordpress site, he states that these toys are not meant to be comforting.  Rather, they are "disturbing and enchanting, irrational and frightening, beautiful and sad."  And discomforting they are.  Some of the dolls are immediately spooky: the kind of thing a 13-year-old lingering outside a Hot Topic would enjoy.  Very quickly, though, his work veers into the horror of severe disfigurement and mutation.  Mouths gape with a snarl of huge, malformed teeth.  Extra eyes, uncomfortable goiters, unreasonable cleft palates, and swollen skulls grace these figures delicately sculpted in paperclay.  Eventually, the dolls, like those in the Fallen series, are reduced to vaguely humanoid lumps of scabrous flesh.

Christina

But, Erin is not in the business of making mere scary dolls.  His work is deeply rooted in world art and mythology.  As such, his works often aim to excavate and explore a personal mythology, creating "artifacts that never were."  In this vein, we see his series of mummies, reminiscent of real-life tiny  mummies or shrunken heads.  Instead of being dressed in child-like nightgowns, these mummies are given crude shifts and bead necklaces- or are tightly bound like a witch-doctor's doll.

When not riffing on the traditions of Western or international art, Erin subverts the human form to make monsters.  Some are genuinely bizarre like the Whispering Roots Woman, while others seem carefully constructed to inspire the most fear.  They'd fit right in to a Guillermo del Toro movie.  Erin will swap out heads for animal parts, tinker with misplaced anatomy, and distort the proportions of his dolls until they are perfect.

The Seer - Journeys of the Soul

The best place to view Erin's work outside of a Google image search is his deviantart gallery.  His blogs (on blogspot and wordpress), are still up as of this article's publication, but don't display as much of his work.  However, this does bring us nicely to the Mystery of Shain Erin!

If you thought you liked this guy because of his talent, craftsmanship, and twisted imagination, I've got one more course of dessert to put in front of you.

Shain Erin has completely disappeared.

As I dug into this artist, to gather information about how they produce their work, their background, and what themes they intend to play with, I found dead end after dead end.  Erin used to have an Etsy storefront where he sold his dolls.  It's not longer in service.  The domain name that he links to from his blogs as his official website (www.shainerin.com) is up for sale.  His still-standing blogs haven't been updated for four and a half years.  His facebook page hasn't shown any activity since October 1, 2011.  In fact, the facebook upload of a photo seems to be his last known communication with the rest of the world.

There's even a sad trail of recent messages on Erin's deviantart page asking where he's gone and hoping that he's okay.  Aside from the two blogs and the deviantart account, Shane Erin isn't on the internet anymore.  Despite the continued attention that his work receives, Erin hasn't come out of the woodwork to display more dolls at art shows, or sell any of his creations.

I'm not sure the question will ever be answered, but it must be asked: What happened to Shane Erin?

-Joanna

Benny Kusnoto - Artist Review

Snail Jester by BennyKusnoto

Vivid and translucent, BennyKusnoto's art is vibrant enough to be alive.  Which is particularly disturbing once you see some of the horrifying configurations of his monsters.

On his Deviantart page (linked near the bottom), you'll find insane, grotesque mishmashes of human parts that juxtapose beautiful ladies' legs, raw red maws, and fiendish insectoid hooks.  These monsters are so detailed and the light so delicately rendered as it falls over them that they are elevated from being merely scary, to being real.  This is what sets BennyKusnoto apart from your typical tentacled-horror scrawler.  His work doesn't rely on blood and guts to get a point across.  Rather, it leverages the texture of pallid flesh, the glistening of mucous.

However, this is just his latest work.  As you explore the page, you'll see that the artist is quite varied and that his style can shift dramatically.  There is definite quality in the earliest submissions to deviantart, that include a lot of really badass Batman fan art.  Later, there's a series of artfully smudged black and white pieces that remind me of Stephen Gammell's nightmare-inducing illustrations for "Scary Stories to Read in the Dark".   Then, there are moody, dramatic portraits of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster and the Mummy.  As you scroll on, you'll pass glossy background textures, and a steampunk beagle.  A STEAMPUNK BEAGLE.

My personal favorites are his horror creatures, though.  I'm glad that the artist seems to find the Joker inspiring because it brought about some of the most amazing scary-clown art I've ever seen.  And I'm not talking Killer Clowns with Big Teeth, I'm talking this:

Tears of a Clown by BennyKusnoto

Those tiny eyes....  (shudder).

Finally, some of the monsters are a bit more conventionally built, but extremely well-designed.  They capture something otherworldly, but in their execution are deeply plausible. There are squid-bats that look like David Attenborough should be narrating them, and aliens that might well skitter under distant foliage, if not the hull of one's spaceship.

Creatura by BennyKusnoto

This sense of reality is, in my opinion, what makes horror art really compelling.  The ability to create an image that suggests a fully-realized, if sinister, world is a talent not many possess.   BennyKusnoto, with his wrinkles and glimmers, creates such worlds.

If you're looking for some extremely high-quality horror illustrations, or just want to check out a super-cool looking redesign of Darth Vader, I will gladly point you to the link below.  

Check out more of his awesome artwork here: http://bennykusnoto.deviantart.com/gallery/

-Joanna