Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Ivory Cthulhu

Russian artist Alex Kuznetsov brings us this wonderful carved ivory Cthulhu pendant.

2 comments:

CoastConFan said...

Apparently this is made of mammoth ivory. There is nothing like using a natural material 12 to 20 thousand years old to make a item. He also has a nice step-by-step sequence of carving a saber toothed tiger on Deveiant Art: http://akuznetsov.deviantart.com/art/Sabretooth-How-to-380820256 Really his work is quite good.

Ronan said...

Ooh, lovely little pendant. The almost tooth/tusk-like tentacles are a very nice touch, and the fact that it's carved from mammoth ivory is just--well, it's perfect. From the point of view of maximizing verisimilitude, it's fantastic that this pendant was carved from a material that, if radiocarbon dated, would show an age of +10,000 years.

If I can be allowed to go off on a tangent, when I first saw this page my browser window was too small to show the full pendant and the eyes were cut off, leading me to interpret the six depressions atop the head as a pair of triple eyes* à la Lovecraft's original sketch. While I'm reasonably sure that that was not the creator's intent, I do wish that more Lovecraftian artists would intentionally invoke that sort of ambiguity--that is, depict the Great Old Ones as giving an impression of some Earthly creature or blend of creatures, right up until the viewer looks more closely and realizes that those "eyes" are actually mouths, or that what appeared to be fur (looking at you, Tsathoggua. I'm sorry, but the basic concept of "Big Fluffy Toad" needs a heck of a lot of tweaking before it can manage to be really terrifying. Same deal with Yog-Sothoth; "Bubbles" should not be an appropriate nickname for the One in All and the All in One) was wriggling across its owner's body...

*Which mistake further led to an undignified and inexplicable "Aww, it's so cute," but that's another matter entirely.