Fabian Fröhlich | Fantastische Illustrationen | Fantastic Illustrations

Posts tagged “Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Illustrations for Edition Metzengerstein and Festa, 1996–98

Henry S. Whitehead was an American writer of horror and fantasy fiction and a friend of H.P. Lovecraft. His portrait (embellished with details from his stories “The Chadburne Episode”, “Scar Tissue” and “Bothon”) was a commission for the short fiction collection Der persische Ghoul. The book was edited by Marco Frenschkowsky, translated and designed by Malte S. Sembten. and published within Frank Festa’s Edition Metzengerstein in 1996.

The acrylic painting portraying H.P. Lovecraft was used as a interior illustration in Lovecrafts Dunke Idole, an anthology with Lovecrafts favorite authors, edited by Frank Festa in 2007.

The cover illustration for Die geheime Kammer by Eddie Angerhuber, also an acrylic painting, wasn’t used for the book. Regardless of whether you like the picture or not (I do like the privet hawk moth, but not the rest), I have to admit that it wouldn’t have matched the edition’s design.

A fourth commission for Edition Metzengerstein were the illustrations for Von Heiligen und Mördern by Brian Hodge.

Cover: © Festa


Illustrations for “The Outsider” by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, 1992

Two-plate linocuts, 12 x 20 cm each.

“…I know not where I was born, save that the castle was infinitely old and infinitely horrible; full of dark passages and having high ceilings where the eye could find only cobwebs and shadows. The stones in the crumbling corridors seemed always hideously damp, and there was an accursed smell everywhere, as of the piled-up corpses of dead generations. It was never light, so that I used sometimes to light candles and gaze steadily at them for relief…”

I discovered Howard Philips Lovecraft (1890 – 1937) in 1985. I was 14, and Lovecraft was the right thing at the right time; within a year I read everything there was (at least in German). “The Outsider” from 1926 (The full text here) has always been one of my favorite stories, I think it’s one the saddest and most disturbing short stories Lovecraft ever wrote.

I made the linocuts during a seminar with Klaus Ensikat (known, for example, as the German illustrator of The Hobbit) at the Kunsthochschule Kassel where I studied Art History, but also had the opportunity to work practically now and then. I used the chance to try things I didn’t do at home, like linocut, etching or drawing from the nude (I am wondering where all these drawings have gone, I am afraid I threw them away, like all the preparatory sketches for paintings – unfortunately).