Category: art

Artist Spotlight – Scurvy Drunkard

Shyarn Koenitz, aka Scurvy Drunkard, is an up-and-coming multimedia artist based in Australia. She first attracted my attention with the paintings she makes with her own blood. Everything she produces is deeply disturbing, and I absolutely love it! Her work touches on themes of fear, body horror, consumption, magic, Eros, and so much else. Who knows what twisted and depraved ideas will come pouring out of her mind at any moment?! See more on her Instagram.

Some of my favorite work of hers, featured below.


Flying Witches – Flemish Miniature

Details from “L’Adoration du bouc” (The Adoration of the Goat) from Jean Tinctor’s, Traité du crime de vauderie, ca. 1470. It was during this period that witches and the Waldensian heretics became associated with the stereotype of flying on broomsticks and beasts to their Sabbats. Thanks to the widespread fabrication of false testimonies obtained under torture, priests and inquisitors were able to literally demonize witchcraft, cementing this type of imagery into the minds of the Christian believers with the help of witchhunting manuals such as Malleus Maleficarum and Compendium Maleficarum, among many others. 


Babylon the Great

And I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication. And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. – Apocalypse, Ch. 17

The Whore of Babylon, Hortus Deliciarum (XII Cent.)