Rob Medley artist – Rob Medley

The protagonist of this piece, if such a thing can be called a protagonist, is a shoggoth at his leisure. He has dressed for the occasion. A black silk topper sits upon the upper mass of him, a monocle is fixed to more than one of the more discerning eyes, and a pocket watch hangs by its chain from a tentacle that has just consulted the hour. It is teatime. The cup waits upon the cushion of the settee. Another tentacle clutches a slim volume, which any reader of Lovecraft should relate to at a glance: At the Mountains of Madness. The shoggoth, evidently, is reading about himself.

The thought animating the painting is what I would describe as post-industrial horror. The horror is not in the creature itself, which is rendered almost companionable. The horror lies in the smoothness with which the cosmic and the domestic have come to terms. The Outside has been invited in, has accepted a cup of tea, and has begun catching up on its correspondence. The wallpaper does not flinch. Nothing in the room registers an objection. That, more than any tentacle, is the unsettling part.

Painted during the Renaissance Festival weekend at the Akron Zoo, with all the cheerful clamor of the event going on around me. There is something fitting in that, I think. A shoggoth produced amid the noise of festival is a shoggoth properly placed.

Acrylic on Canvas, 18×24. Available.

A surreal painting depicting a creature with a mass of tentacles and multiple eyes, wearing a top hat, seated in a vintage chair against a patterned background.

Note: I finished this in 2025 – I just never posted it to the website.

Every painter who has ever picked up a brush in the last sixty years owes Warhol a debt and an argument. The debt is obvious — he proved that bold, flat colour against a strong ground could carry genuine spiritual weight. The argument is this: thirty-two Marilyns in a grid is magnificent once. It becomes wallpaper by the third print run.

This piece began as a tribute to exactly that tradition. Gold ground, high contrast, flattened form — the visual DNA of a Warhol screen print, translated into acrylic. Anubis as icon. The idea had merit.

Then the jackal had other plans.

An artistic depiction of Anubis, featuring stylized illustrations of a black jackal-headed figure in various poses, adorned with blue and gold accents, along with a colorful scarab beetle and a falcon motif in the background. — Pop Psychopomp

Somewhere in the process the painting stopped being a tribute and started being a conversation. The anthropomorphic god refused to stay in his single frame, so a second panel arrived — the pure jackal form, recumbent, collared in red, ancient and watchful. A winged scarab claimed the upper left corner as its own territory. White geometric lines divided the surface like a comic book page, and suddenly the whole thing had the structure of sequential art rather than pop repetition.

Which, on reflection, is far more honest to the subject matter. Anubis is a god of passage and transformation. He does not stand still for his portrait. He guides, he weighs, he opens the way — three distinct functions rendered here as three distinct panels. Warhol’s genius was the freeze-frame, the idol held perpetually in amber. Anubis resists that entirely.

The gold ground remained. In Egyptian funerary art it signified the flesh of the gods, the light that persisted inside the Duat between one sunrise and the next. That much, Warhol and the Old Kingdom agree upon: gold means something permanent lives here.

Pop Psychopomp. The icon who refuses to be merely iconic. Available,