Weird Stories About Weird Art

[MagnusTC]

Once again I turn to you for help! I am looking for weird stories about visual art works such as paintings, sculptures, drawings, installations and conceptual works. Stories about horror in art galleries or artist studios are also welcome. Here is what I have read and found useful so far, I am sure there is much more to discover :-)

H. P. Lovecraft: Hypnos; Pickman's Model
Edgar Allan Poe: The Oval Portrait
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
M. R. James: The Mezzotint
Robert Aickman: Ravissante; The View
Gustav Meyrink: Golem
Thomas Ligotti: Les Fleurs; The Lost Art of Twilight; The Bungalow House; Severini; The Shadow, The Darkness
Mark Samuels: Mannequins in Aspects of Terror

Any recommendations would be much appreciated!

[hopfrog]

I have penned many such tales, as I am obsessed with art and artists. Probably the best of my stories is "Inhabitants of Wraithwood," originally in the anthology BLACK WINGS (S. T. Joshi, editor), and has been reprinted in THE TANGLED MUSE, and will soon be reprinted in paperback in my next book from Hippocampus Press, UNCOMMON PLACES. At the end of this year Dark Regions Press will published a book I co-wrote with Jeffrey Thomas, ENCOUNTERS WITH ENOCH COFFIN, an entire collection of tales concerning a haunted New England artist and his encounters with Lovecraftian horror.

[DoktorH]

Laird Barron: The Imago Sequence
H.p. Lovecraft: The Picture in the house ( the old engraving in the book)

Movies:
The Ring
V/H/S
Hellraiser and some of the sequels
Videodrome
Needle
the Beaver (puppet taking control of puppeteer)
Wizard of Gore (2007 remake) (magic show)

[Michael]

It seems like a section of Reggie Oliver's work falls under this category, especially if you take a looser definition of art to include music or theatre for example ("The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler").
Would Sarban's "Doll Maker" count as sculpture?

[MagnusTC]

Quote

It seems like a section of Reggie Oliver's work falls under this category, especially if you take a looser definition of art to include music or theatre for example ("The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler"). Would Sarban's "Doll Maker" count as sculpture?

I think I am mainly interested in stories based on conventional art objects such as paintings, drawings etc. and not so much in stories about music or theatre, even though these genres obviously also belong somewhere in the art category. Unsure about dolls, toys and similar objects, - and haven't read the specific story by Sarban ... perhaps if the dolls were exhibited as installation art (as in Mark Samuel's Mannequins in Aspects of Terror)?

[Mr Loligo]

"A Slate Roof In The Rain" by Jeremy Dyson. About a young boy's unnerving artistic talents, from the collection "Never Trust a Rabbit"

[EemeliJ]

"A Carpet Seldom Found" by Rhys Hughes. A rather curious carpet actually. Worth mentioning here even though not exactly what you may be looking for.

[rhysaurus]

Thanks for that mention, Eemelij!
Secretly (or not so secretly now) I regard 'A Carpet Seldom Found' as the first good story I ever wrote. I'd just returned from Konya in Turkey, the spiritual heartland of Sufiism, where carpets really are considered to be works of high art.

My favourite literary work about 'weird' art is George Perec's novel Life: a User's Manual, in which the main narrator, Bartlebooth, devises a kind of art that involves (in careful sequence) learning to become a good painter, travelling the world, painting port scenes, turning them into jigsaw puzzles, solving them, sticking them back together and dissolving the paint until only blank sheets remain. It's a conceptual art project that is supposed to take exactly 50 years but it goes wrong... and the consequences are weird... (not 'weird' in a Lovecraftian sense; but even weirder than that).

[DoktorH]

Comic Books:
Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, by Jhonen Vasquez - the title character is a painter who has been driven mad by something behind a particular wall in his basement, and he must keep painting that wall with the blood of his victims. He also talks to two Pilsbury Doughboy displays that have either been brought to life by the thing behind the wall or appear alive because Johnny is quite mad.
Lovecraft, by Keith Giffen - There's a particular book that HPL has to protect so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

[Gray House]

Hopfrog's "Inhabitants of Wraithwood" is excellent.
Ligotti's "Teatro Grottesco" and "The Strange Design of Master Rignolo".
Clark Ashton Smith's "Genius Loci".
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's "Tattoo".
Baudelaire's "The Desire to Paint".
Caitlin R. Kiernan's nightmare vision of art in the future, "A Season of Broken Dolls".