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Renato Andrade's avatar

Mattia is no less than magnificent. The way he viewed and felt this page always reminds me of a dreamlike feeling, the composition of the landscape sounds dreamlike, in a Lovecraftian way. The gray palettes, the slowness, the beach, the mist, the rocks, the eyes, the creature and the cloudy sky. It is an almost palpable synesthetic mosaic. And it comes, the same feeling as when I read The Night Ocean (1936) by R.H. Barlow with Lovecraft itself. There is an excerpt that might describe my feeling,

“Now that I am trying to tell what I saw I am aware of a thousand maddening limitations. Things seen by the inward sight, like those flashing visions which come as we drift into the blankness of sleep, are more lived and meaningful to us in that form than when we have sought to weld them with reality. Set a pen to a dream, and the color drains from it. The ink with which we write seems to dilute with something holding too much of reality, and we find that after all we cannot delineate the incredible memory.”

Honestly, I love these landscapes of nature with an unnatural object in the middle, the feeling of "strangeness from the unknown" coursing through your veins. Like the narrator of the aforementioned short story, he describes his mood for this as a sight of “brief hideousness and underlying filth of life,” the “lethargic fear…of the peering stars and of the enormous black waves that welcome to clasp [his] bones within them—the vengeance of all the indifferent, horrendous majesty of the night ocean.”

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Dean Hacker's avatar

Hyper-realistic comic artists that also have cartooning skills kind of blow my mind. For the longest time it was realism vs. expressiveness, but this is both.

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