Necronom V

Before any of the rest of it, there was Giger.

Bert Ernie first came across H.R. Giger in the pages of Omni magazine, bought issue by issue through the seventies. Then Alien came out. After that it was the big art books at the local library, and in one of them, Necronom V. It stopped him dead. Horror, nature and sex jammed into a single picture, all in grey, painted with a level of skill that made most other things look lazy.

You couldn’t buy a poster of it. So he made one.

The method went like this. Two pages through the library’s A3 photocopier, trimmed and joined. A grid ruled over the copy, the same grid scaled up onto a big sheet of thick card, then square by square from there. That was how photorealism got done in the early nineties, and it’s how people had been doing it for a few hundred years before that.

He meant to airbrush it, because Giger did, and the smooth tones give that away. The airbrush had other ideas. Masking took forever and the ink clogged constantly, so in the end he gave up on it and did the rest by hand in Liquitex acrylic.

The card wasn’t quite the same shape as the original, so the bottom got stretched a little to fill the gap. Nobody has ever noticed. Everything else stays true to the source, including the palette, which is to say grey, more grey, and black.

It went straight on the bedroom wall. That was the whole point.

The other thing he took from it is that copying is the oldest and most honest way to learn. He’ll bring up the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century at this point, and their apprentices, who learned the trade by copying. He’s not wrong.

For a hand-painted copy taken off a photocopy, it’s very good. It’s still somebody else’s painting.

This is where everything started.

Detail views of realism painting Necronom V