“Mutation” indeed gets at the heart of Potter’s recurring themes; the bold layering and blending of disparate elements that lend his work to narrative is suggestive of constant transition in some form or another, often with either overtly or subtly macabre sensibilities.  This sense of the macabre is often grounded in bodily concerns that merge the monstrous with the sensual, suggesting that the two are perhaps more closely related than we’d like to acknowledge.  In addition to these ideas being presented in his numerous illustrations for the works of speculative fiction authors, he has also released collections of his own work that explore these topics somewhat more freely, in the form of Neurotica (featuring modeling from weird author Poppy Z. Brite) and Horripilations. We talked to Potter to get more of the story behind his work.

“The Taborin Scale” by J.K. Potter

Weird Fiction Review: Can you tell us a little bit about your process? Do you begin with a particular goal in mind for the image you want to arrive at, or do you perhaps have a more “play it by ear” approach?

J.K. Potter: Because I use photography and because I am dependent on models my first goal in illustrating a book is finding scenes that I can actually pull off considering the limitations of my techniques. I ask myself, what do I see in this story that I can recreate using my own source material, my surroundings, models, props, etc. I am not quite as versatile as illustrators who paint and draw. I recently had a falling out with a publisher who tried to tell me exactly what scenes in a book to illustrate. I’m more flexible on covers but I have to be free to pick my own interiors. That’s just how I’ve always worked from day one. Interestingly, I had someone recently ask me where I get my source images. They were surprised to find out I take my own pictures. They thought I was buying them from some secret Fantasy-Horror stock photo archive!

WFR: What do you feel is the role of art when it comes to interacting with the story in question?

JKP: Illustrating a book immediately puts me in a coffin with the author’s name on it. This isn’t as bad as it sounds. As an illustrator I try to inhabit the author’s fictional world. All images are subservient to the writing. They wouldn’t exist without the author so they are not personal works but collaborative ones. The authors I illustrate often push me into unique worlds that I never would have found on my own. This sometimes ends up affecting my personal work in positive ways. I admit that sometime I’ve missed my cues and produced inaccurate illustrations, but one can’t always be perfect.

“Ghosts of the Hotel Grim #2” by J.K. Potter

WFR: Do your methods differ when you’re working on your own personal projects versus working on images for a book?

JKP: There are hundreds of personal works on my website jkpotter.com. They are different from my illustrations in many ways. First, many are location driven. I am obsessed with haunted places. Ghosts are my specialty. The weird crumbling factories and abandoned places I photograph inspire me to create new ghostly and monstrous things much in the same way it does working with an author . A good example is my Ghosts of the Hotel Grim project. The whole series grew out of my experiences in an actual place in Texas whose real name is the Hotel Grim. My personal works are more rooted in reality than my illustrations. I take a lot of straight photos and they are scattered throughout my personal projects. These confuse some of my old-school fans who say to me, “Hey that’s just a picture of a girl in a swamp. Why doesn’t she have a shark-mouth or something!?” They expect more flashy effects but I like taking straight-up photos and will continue to do so.

WFR: How did you get started in art?

JKP: I started in grade school drawing pictures of certain teachers I didn’t like with nails and hatchets in their heads. I learned that the other kids would give me their lunch money for these kind of drawings. My first published work was in a 1975 issue of Nils Hardin’s pulpzine Xenophile. It was an intricate ink drawing on the cover of the First World Fantasy Convention commemorative issue. It makes me sad when other people try to take credit for what Nils Hardin did for me. Nils really discovered me and launched my career. He once generously sent me an original piece of art by Clark Ashton Smith. I still have it. Don Grant published my first illustrated book Tales Of The Werewolf Clan way back in 1979. Don gave me a second big boost.

“Ghosts of the Hotel Grim #1” by J.K. Potter

WFR: You’ve had quite a long and prolific career. How do you think your art has evolved over the course of your career?

JKP: About 1977, I started using photography because I was the world’s slowest artist. It would take me months to finish one piece. From 1977 to about 2005 I was a dedicated film-camera, darkroom, and airbrush guy. Strictly analog. I stubbornly stayed a film junkie well into the computer age and only switched to digital when the darkroom started destroying my health. In the days before Photoshop, I was really able to develop a name for myself, and I have built on that ever since. Happily, the skills and work-ethic I developed in my darkroom days have carried over extremely well into Photoshop. Things are definitely easier now, but it’s not quite as romantic to me as it was during the film era. For some reason, I liked doing things the hardest way possible. That’s what really made me. As my career has evolved, I’ve also broadened my horizons from strictly Horror to Fantasy, Science Fiction, Steam Punk, and mainstream illustration. I’ve had a few really great editors who refused to typecast me and who helped me to grow. I’ve been very, very lucky in that regard.

WFR: Who are some of your favorite weird fiction authors? Are there any authors who have specifically influenced your art?

JKP: Besides the authors I’ve been most associated with, most of the writers I’ve been influenced by can be found listed in H.P.Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” I also love authors like Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers, but I don’t want to leave out non-literary stuff like Al Feldstein in EC comics, Steve Ditko in early Marvel monster comics, Creepy and Eerie magazines… I could go on and on forever.

WFR: Who are some of your influences? Who are some of your favorite visual artists?

JKP: These days I’m into freight-train graffiti and tags, hobo art, art of the insane, old monster movies, Cramps-style rockabilly horror, pulp magazine covers, and vintage Halloween stuff. Really anything offbeat or oddball attracts me. Right now my favorite artist is a graffiti guy who just calls himself 27. You can see a few of his drawings in photographs for my Love Your Yard series.

WFR: What are you currently working on? What have you worked on or released recently?

JKP: I’ve been scanning a lot of my oldest works in preparation for resurrecting them on my website, making prints, and preparing a new art book. I’ve also been working on an illustrated essay called “Behind The Scenes: The Face That Must Die” to memorialize my first great model/collaborator Dead Joe. My latest profusely illustrated project is a small book by Tim Powers. It’s called Nobody’s Home and is published by Subterranean Press. Tim Powers has probably influenced me most out of all the authors I’ve worked with in recent years. I would also like to recommend Five Autobiographies and a Fiction by the late great Lucius Shepard. There are no interior illustrations, just a cover by me, but it is a truly mind-boggling anthology. If you are interested in weird fiction you should not miss it.

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WeirdFictionReview: Your art is very distinct and easy to identify. It’s an interesting combination that ranges from Gothic to surreal to fantastical. How do you tend to describe your style?

Santiago Caruso: Today, I would define myself as a Symbolist, who recreates the deformation of reality that the human being perceives — i.e. the phantom of conventional objects — to go deeper into them with a new kind of perception. I try to summon a poetic phantom that supplies a wider vision of the human, contemplating the beautiful, the frightening, the repressed or forgotten in the shadows, the impossible. With this concept of depiction, I try to utilize Gothic symbolism as a crystallized view of the world in many respects. I combine religion, politics, and commonplace things to reveal another vision of the world with regard to the unconscious, the damned ghosts we’ve buried, and many other aspects of history and philosophy.

WFR: How did you become an artist? What artists or artworks have influenced your work?

SC: From a very early age, I remember building houses, ships, and other stuff with boxes or chairs and playing in them with toys; inventing stories is something I’ve always done since then. Drawings and music were also present since the first days of my childhood. I copied comic strips such as Patoruzú, Condorito and Afanancio. I also made caricatures of people and by chance, I attended classes with a teacher who did comics when I was 14 years old. Music was always there, in addition, influencing my artwork.

Later, at 19, I made illustration my medium of expression. I started making children’s illustrations in books for school. Later, under the influence of William Blake and other Symbolists, such as Max Klinger, Alfred Kubin, and Odilon Redon, my style underwent a change in order to be the same tone of the themes I saw in their images. The questions of evil, sin, love, memory and beauty, are subjects that were inspiring to me, so the narrative path I took to illustrate weird fiction turned later from the anecdotic allegory into poetry in order to build a narrative and not just a moment in the story. I do oscillate between those languages, depending on the text and how I want to express the content. These days, I am writing and I believe those scripts can be songs. I don’t know, but maybe I will do something with music too.

WFR: You’ve done art for a number of weird fiction books like The King in the Golden Mask and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. Do you read weird fiction?

SC: Yes, I do. My artwork is closely related with fantastic literature of the XIX century and philosophy. I am between Romanticism and psychology, poetry and skepticism.

I am related to the word, or I should say, to language. I believe I construct my images as if I were writing them. The final view of it must communicate in one glance the general feeling and idea, but after that, you can read the image almost as a text, so it must be built with the same rules of grammar if you want to express yourself clearly.

WFR: Are there authors or poets have inspired you? Are there any particular books, literature, poems that have inspired your works?

SC: One of the special moments of change in my life was when I read the writings of William Blake and Charles Baudelaire. The latter is almost like a father to my style. I could say I am always returning to him as a prodigal son. I’ve also started reading Poe, Lovecraft, Meyrink, and many others but the particular view of Marcel Schwob is the perfect mirror I’ve found for my visual narrative. The French Decadent movement is the weird literature I love the most, specifically À rebours (Against Nature) by J. K. Huysmans.

As a project next year, I have the hard task of undertaking “Les chants de Maldoror”, but I will enjoy the challenge. The strange tone and eclectic mood of the writings of Pascal Quignard is another thing I find inspiring. I try to express this in the change from narrative to visual poetry I do these days. However, the tone of my images is also somewhat rooted in Eastern European taste. It’s quite a mysterious link since I didn’t see any of their products until some time after I changed the way I depict the world, transitioning from the grotesque to classic figuration between 2004 and 2005.

WFR: What sorts of media do you use? Can you tell us about your process of painting?

SC: I usually use ink and watercolors. The ink is applied over a plastered cardboard and is later scratched with a cutter to depict the lighting. There is no sketch, so I work slowly, using the shape of spots of ink from the base, to construct my figures in there, in the shadows.

Recently, to save time, I returned to tempera and acrylics images with a textural mood in a dark tone like my other scratched art. I want to paint again in oils, after almost ten years. I’ll see if I find the time for it.

WFR: In Argentina, are there other visual artists, poets, authors who are pursuing the same sort of art and style as you?

SC: Yes, while exploring art, I’ve found others like Guillermo Roux, Quique Alcatena, and Federico Parolo, who present a world of strangeness and symbolisms. If I go far enough in the past, I’ve also enjoyed the engravings of Víctor Delhez, a Belgian-born artist, raised in Argentina since his youth, who has illustrated Lord Dunsany, Charles Baudelaire, and Saint John’s Apocalypse. In writing, I’ll mention María Negroni and Ángel Olgoso, who give a poetic treatment of the fantastique. Lastly, I made some illustrations for a book of Olgoso, which is still looking for a publisher.

WFR: What do you consider as some of your best pieces?

SC: Time will tell, but I’ll mention Portrait of Crime, Wunderkammer, Lies Beneath, UNIVERSA MYSTERIUM. Anyway, the best painting is the one I haven’t done yet.

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