Mercy House

Tuesday, November 5th, 2013

Mercy House by Amy Crook

“Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.”
-H.P. Lovecraft, “The Picture in the House”

I’ve been wanting to paint a house to go with this quote for a while, and October seemed the perfect month for a fretful, unhappy wreck of a house to emerge from the cool green background. There’s a quality to the paint that’s hard to capture on film, an unnatural wash watery green across the whole thing that slips it sideways into the world of Lovecraft’s special brand of madness.

Mercy House, 8″x10″ watercolor on watercolor paper.

Mercy House, detail, by Amy Crook

Above, you can see the tiny glints of sunlight off the blindly staring window, and the black gap where the door once was. I never did decide if those fragments of sun are on shattered glass, or merely filtered through the encroaching leaves surrounding the house. Below, I’ve put the piece in an antiqued gold frame, the better to emphasize the sense of decay.

Mercy House, framed art by Amy Crook

This piece always puts Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “The Mercy Seat” in my head. Because of reasons.

Categories: Angels, Cthulhu, and Other Myths, Floating Gallery, Flowers, Trees and Landscapes, Zombies, Skulls, and Other Morbid Things
Tags: house, lovecraft, nfs, sold, watercolor