tentacle art – 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.

The Unsalvageable — Acrylic on Canvas 18″x24″

There are charts for every sea. Degree by degree, the compass rose promises orientation, mastery, the civilised fiction that one always knows where one stands. The ring of numbers encircling this composition — 165, 180, 195, 210, 225 — speaks that language of navigation with calm authority, even as everything within it descends into beautiful catastrophe.

A tall ship rides the centre of the world, her furled sails the colour of bruised twilight, blue-violet against a sky of burning vermillion. The moon lingers behind her masts like a pale witness, uncommitted and cold. Below, the sea has already made its judgement: dark, frothing, circling inward in that particular way water moves when something vast displaces it from beneath.

The kraken comes not as surprise. It comes as verdict.

An artistic depiction of a ship surrounded by stylized octopus tentacles, with a vibrant orange background and a compass-like design.

Those deep crimson tentacles do not merely attack — they catalogue. Each coil is deliberate, almost ceremonial, winding about hull and rigging with the patience of a thing that has outlasted a thousand such vessels. The contrast of that arterial red against the orange fire of the background gives the creature an almost volcanic quality, as though the deep itself has erupted.

And the compass rose watches. It measures nothing now. It records everything.

The title carries its full weight. There is no salvage operation equal to this reckoning.
Available. Inquiries welcome.