Exploring the intersection between Romantic and Classical art and metal through the cover illustrations of Cleveland's own.
Words by Maya Junkins (@maya.junkins):
The illustrator and graphic designer Caelan Stokkermans, based out of Cleveland, Ohio, epitomizes the resurgence of dark Romantic and Classical art representing the music of certain heavy metal genres, such as death metal, deathcore, and symphonic metal. As Art Director and Senior Product Manager at Unique Leader Records, Stokkermans works closely with these bands to create their artwork, logos, and merchandise. Stokkermans fuses classical techniques, old master studies, and inspiration from 15th to 20th century European painting with contemporary medieval, occult, and dark fantasy media to create his digital paintings and album covers. Impressively, his use of the digital medium does not limit his ability to use traditional painting techniques, such as Grisaille (monochromatic) or Brunaille (brown tones) underpainting, along with the building up layers from background to foreground. Stokkermans' fusion of technique and medium shines in his work, giving him an instantly recognizable style. The genres of Romanticism, the Baroque, and Neoclassicism reemerge to find an unlikely home in heavy music, as their style can be used to represent overlapping themes of terror, gore, and dark subjects loved by the metal community. Stokkermans reemploys dark Romantic themes of the sublime, the wanderer, and cataclysms, within the context of the contemporary world of heavy metal art, combining them with modern influences of fantasy, horror, and the occult.
Stokkermans' painting process begins with a technical drawing, then an underpainting, until he finally begins painting in sections on top of that. He says, "My process follows the same process as Caravaggio and a lot of artists from that era… a little bit different from the Romantic artists, who I believe were a little bit more loose and free with the way they were painting." Despite his commitment to the Classical method, he admits his style is not as tight as the painters of Caravaggio's era or even Neoclassicists; "I like to try to be a little more loose in my work, in certain parts, because I like when you can see the layers to it, you know, how the artist went about doing it, which is what's always gravitated me towards J.M.W. Turner, because his work, especially his later work, was a lot more loose." By contrasting method and execution, Stokkermans' style lies in a unique liminal space between the Classical and the Romantic. His Romantic influence can be seen in the expressionistic brushstrokes and the subjects of nature, human emotion, and the sublime, whereas his Classical influence lies more in the composition and imagery of Classical architecture and sculpture. His compositions often use the golden ratio — an ancient Greek mathematical device used by Classical artists to create an aesthetic visual composition — which has a middle-ground perspective. Over time, Stokkermans' execution has grown tighter, reflecting the polished Classical look, as compared to some of his earlier works from 2021 to 2023 of Romantic subjects, which are more chaotic and loose, adding to their Romantic sensibility.
While combining multiple art historical genres, it is important for Stokkermans to stay true to the era. He says, "I also try to use a very limited color palette, so it's not as much of the bright, highly saturated colors that you see… I try not to have any very modern themes in my works. I try to make it look as if it came out of that specific era." Stokkermans sometimes creates a full landscape-size painting from which a small square is taken for an album cover, while other times he works directly with the square space. He acknowledges that the square proportions of an album cover can sometimes be limiting for him, but he has grown to work with it. He says, "Most of the time the covers are usually square. Sometimes it will be an extended background for the back cover of the vinyl or CD. I just have been doing it for so long that I just think in terms of that square perspective… Sometimes it almost looks like a full painting that I cropped, which kind of works with the whole theme too, but usually I just try to sort of fit it, smush it, into that kind of perspective without making it a little bit too busy."
Stokkermans' digital works show how he combines the ideas and visual imagery of English Romanticism and his own style to reinforce dark ideas of the sublime, specifically his painting Cataclysian (2023), and his album artwork for Abiotic's A Universal Plague: Mutation (2022), Sentinels' Collapse by Design (2021), and The Eating Cave's Ingurgitate (2021). The sublime was the Romantic idea of nature creating a feeling of awe through its terror and immensity. In Stokkermans' works, he takes inspiration from the Romantic paintings of J.M.W. Turner, John Martin, and Thomas Cole, who focus on this idea of the sublime.
The commissioned piece from 2023, entitled Cataclysian, demonstrates Stokkermans' influence from all of these English Romantic artists. The piece takes its inspiration directly from the username of Caelan's Twitch streamer client, Cataclysian. Cataclysms, being violent, large-scale natural disasters or destruction, were a popular Romantic subject because of their sublimity and ability to demonstrate the power of God. John Martin was an English Romantic painter, engraver, and illustrator, known best for his depictions of common cataclysmic subjects such as the Genesis flood, the Plagues of Egypt, and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Stokkermans names Pompeii as a big inspiration for this piece, reflected in the erupting volcano in the top right. However, the most obvious reference in Cataclysian is to Thomas Cole's The Course of Empire: Destruction (1836), the fourth painting in The Course of Empire series. The compositions and subjects are strikingly similar, as we see the headless classical statue on the right side of Cataclysian, overlooking the ongoing ruination, and burning classical architecture with a swirling storm of clouds on the left-hand side. The largest figure in Catacylsian, dressed in red robes, mimics the pose of the largest centered figure in The Course of Empire: Destruction, the woman in white being grabbed by an enemy soldier. It can be argued that Stokkermans' piece is more sublime than Cole's, as the only enemy is nature itself: the erupting volcano in the top right, rather than Cole's choice of an army. The curvature of the stormy clouds in Cataclysian also reflects sublime depictions of cataclysmic events used by Turner, Martin, and Cole. This can be seen in examples such as Turner's Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812) and Martin's Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still Upon Gibeon (1816).
This golden ratio composition with the swirling clouds on the left-hand side is also reflected in an earlier work from Caelan, for Sentinels' Collapse by Design, more loosely inspired and pushed further into sci-fi and fantasy. With inspiration given to him from the band, Stokkermans relates it back to cataclysms, saying, "I believe the band actually sent me a still from the Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) movie, where they're going into that huge sandstorm and so that really vibed with me. A lot of John Martin's work, where he has the huge clouds engulfing a city and all the very biblical destruction sort of paintings that he has, that was a big influence. And then they wanted, I believe, the whole concept behind it was being caught in this very tumultuous storm and then having some sort of ray of light shining through." Given this idea, Stokkermans takes a tumultuous desert landscape and plugs it into the Romantic formula, with ruins of Classical columns, the lone wanderer figure, similar to the statue in The Course of Empire: Destruction, and finally the Romantic cloud formation. This chaotic and cataclysmic storm with a glimpse of light, representing hope, is like the ones seen in previously mentioned works such as Turner's Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps and Martin's Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still Upon Gibeon, as well as Stokkermans' own Cataclysian.
Stokkermans recalls having difficulty with this piece, as he was in the beginning stages of exploring the Romantic style. He says, "I remember actually struggling a bit with [Collapse by Design] because I was still learning the style of Classical/Romantic art and incorporating it into the way that I do it digitally. So it was a lot of adjusting and painting over brushstrokes. So that painting ended up actually adding to the very chaotic sort of composition that was created out of that. Nowadays, I probably would have done it a lot more neatly." Stokkermans' inexperience with the Romantic style in this piece actually works in its favor, reflecting a more abstract and loose style like that of Turner, the chaos making the storm feel more dangerous and alive.
Stokkermans' album artwork for Abiotic's A Universal Plague: Mutation reflects a mix of the English Romantic painter John Martin's different depictions of cataclysms. A Universal Plague: Mutation was a rerelease of the death metal band's 2011 EP A Universal Plague, so the album cover takes inspiration from the original artwork with its pink and purple color palette and spherical planet. Stokkermans combines the ideas of the original artwork with inspiration from Martin's Fallen Angels Entering Pandemonium (1841) along with elements from The Deluge (1834). Stokkermans speaks to his inspiration: "The Deluge was a big [inspiration], especially that reddish sun in the background, this sickly sun, which is a very prevalent idea in A Universal Plague. It was a reworking of the original cover, which has this photo manipulation of a figure, and there's a big planet in the middle of it. So for that, it very much looked like the dome that you see in John Martin's painting [Fallen Angels Entering Pandemonium]. So I incorporated that into a sort of new version of that original cover. And then they wanted all these bodies laying around, so that was also very much the whole Fallen Angels sort of theme."
The influence of these two Martin paintings can be seen clearly in the composition and imagery. The composition directly mirrors Fallen Angels Entering Pandemonium, with a foreground of rocks and lava, a middle ground of more rocky cliffs, and a background of sky with a dome and stormy lightning clouds. The singular outcropping of rock in the middle of Stokkermans' work is the same as that featured in both The Deluge and Fallen Angels Entering Pandemonium. The lightning, which comes close to striking a wanderer figure who stands on the center rock, imitates the lightning in the same position in The Deluge. The planet in A Universal Plague: Mutation takes the "sickly sun" in The Deluge and the domed architecture in Fallen Angels Entering Pandemonium and transforms it to emulate the imagery of the pink planet in the original album artwork. With the lone figure facing tumultuous nature, the Romantic theme of the wanderer in the face of the sublime reemerges once again in Stokkermans' creative reworking of A Universal Plague by using Martin as a reference.
Finally, Stokkermans' album artwork for The Eating Cave's Ingurgitate directly references J.M.W. Turner's Death on a Pale Horse (c. 1825-1830). Stokkermans takes Turner's figure of death and drapes it over a rocky and geometric landscape, the skeleton becoming an eating cave, with its mouth open ready to receive the figures on the bottom left. Stokkermans takes special interest in Turner's style and the specific piece, Death on a Pale Horse, because of its abstract and possibly unfinished nature. He says, "Death on a Pale Horse has been a very interesting painting for me, because it almost looks like an abstract painting, which for that, JMW Turner was way beyond any other painter of his era in the way that he has a very impressionist look. I really like the idea of it being unfinished and finishing in myself and in my own sort of style." Stokkermans grounds the figure of death, and while there is no literal horse in his piece, he keeps the abstract nature of Turner in the sky, where he uses the light to suggest the shape of the pale horse. Anyone familiar with Death on a Pale Horse would recognize it as where the horse would go, whereas an uneducated viewer would simply see it as a highlight of color in the sky. This is the beauty of Stokkermans taking Turner's piece and making it his own; the unfinished nature of Death on a Pale Horse makes it easier for Stokkermans to adapt his reference to the themes and ideas of the album, while maintaining a clear similarity to the image through color palette and composition.
Stokkermans cleverly combines inspiration from the album title and the band's name with a more symbolist and realist approach — Stokkermans explicitly mentions the Polish Surrealist Zdzisław Beksiński for these inclinations: "The whole idea was that it was this gigantic sort of corpse and this cannibalistic figure, small on the bottom, dragging his victim into what is essentially this eating cave. So it's a sort of twist on the whole Eating Cave, the [band] name, and Ingurgitate, the album title, where you have a cannibal consuming something of its own flesh within something that is basically a bigger version of itself, so a cyclical sort of process. So that figure will look like a collapsing corpse. Then, a lot of influence was actually from Beksinski as well. With the big pillars, I wanted the whole thing to be like a dream-like state, more of the symbolist work that I do." Here, Stokkermans demonstrates his ability to fluidly pair Romanticism with other art historical genres under his style.
Stokkermans' three album covers for Collapse by Design, A Universal Plague: Mutation, and Ingurgitate and his commissioned painting, Catacylsian, revive English Romanticism into the contemporary world of metal's dark imagery. Stokkermans explains the origin of this imagery as the black metal scene, starting in the 1980s with bands like Mayhem. He says, "That genre has a lot more of that Romantic sort of symbolism and content… also it's something that's familiar to the metal scene because it's a lot of depictions of religious themes, a lot of which is also very prevalent in metal." The themes of English Romanticism, such as sublime cataclysms and the wanderer, alongside Stokkermans' other Classical and Baroque themes in his other works, remain relevant to the current metal scene. It's easy to see how the sublime, finding beauty and wonder in terror and intensity, resonates with lovers of extreme music. Metal remains a living, breathing example of the Romantic sublime that the English artists J.M.W. Turner, John Martin, and Thomas Cole avidly explored.
To see more and stay up to date with the at of Caelan Stokkermans, head to his website.
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