Picture #1: Thomas Coles The Voyage Of Life: Old Age used for the cover art of CANDLEMASSs 2nd full album Nightfall released in 1987. Picture #2: Thomas Coles The Voyage Of Life: Youth used for the cover art of CANDLEMASSs 3rd full album Ancient Dreams released in 1988. The cover art of an album doesnt merely visually intensify peoples desire to buy it but represents or even compliments the music. Furthermore, the collection of cover art says about the musical characteristics and/or the ideological standpoint of the band as eloquently as the music itself. For example, in my previous post I introduced a British graphic designer Dave Patchett, whose works of art that were strongly influenced by those of Hieronymus Bosch, have been extensively used for the cover art of many albums released by a legendary British doom metal band CATHEDRAL. CATHEDRALs bizarre and unique music can be described as a chaotic mixture of the primitive extreme metal including death metal and grindcore, and the underground psychedelic rock from the 1970s as well as some earliest pioneers of heavy metal and punk rock emerged from the U.K., and its colorful world full of weird details has been significantly enhanced by Patchetts artworks without a doubt. In fact, not only CATHEDRAL but all of the three most influential bands in the genre of doom metal has their own favorite art designers and/or painters for the purpose of using their works of art for the album covers, and the striking differences between the bands music styles are interestingly represented by the remarkable differences between the artists painting/drawing styles. Today Id like to introduce the two paintings from a well-renowned four-painting series The Voyage of Life(1842) by an American painter Thomas Cole because those paintings were used for the cover art of early two albums of another legendary doom metal act CANDLEMASS. Cole was known to be the father of the Hudson River School, a mid-19th century American art movement by a fraternity of American landscape painters who were greatly inspired by European Romantic landscape painters such as Claude Lorrain and J. M. W. Turner, both of whose names should now be quite familiar with you. Some people consider him as the best American landscape painter ever. CANDLEMASS has been distinguished for its sophisticated and solemn music, of which the band has owed much to the one and only vocalist Messiah Mercolin, whose vibrato-laden operatic singing style has been a great match for their epic doom metal sound. After the release of their debut album Epicus Doomicus Metallicus(1986), Mercolin joined the band and quickly gained power over the bans decisions, and he was the one who actually selected the Coles painting Old Age as the cover art of their groundbreaking second album Nightfall(1987), as well as another Coles work Youth as the cover art of the following album Ancient Dreams(1988). As I have mentioned earlier, these two paintings belong to the Coles four-painting series The Voyage of Life, in which Cole allegorically depicts the four stages of human life, which are in chronological order childhood, youth, manhood, and old age, in the symbolic form of a pilgrims journey along the River of Life with a guardian angel. In the painting Youth, the voyager reaches out his hand and strives to get to the mirage of a magnificent castle, which may well be a metaphor of adolescent ambition for glory and fame, whereas in the series last painting Old Age, his journey ends where the River of Life meets the Ocean of Eternity, and all the elements in this celestially beautiful painting imply departure from the earth and bright hope for salvation. ※注釈：Hudson River Schoolとは、日本語だと「ハドソン・リバー派」等と訳されています。米国出身の風景画家達によって19世紀に誕生した画派であり、欧州で隆盛したロマン主義絵画への回答と言うべき作風が特徴。日本では未だ知名度が低い感は否めませんが、幻想的で壮大な風景画が好きな方にはお勧めです。
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 03:31:50 +0000
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