I write about a lot of various artists who work in all sorts of media and styles, but at the end of the day, super intricate, gothy stuff like the work of Austrian-born, Canada-based artist Otto Rapp is what really gives me an art boner.

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Russian illustrator Vania Zouravliov’s drawings has a turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century dark gothic feel to them, mixed with the colors and styles of communist Eastern Europe and pop Asia. The result is extremely cool without being too hip.

Australian illustrator Ken Taylor has created imagery for some of rock n’ ’roll’s great purveyors of sound, from the Rolling Stones and Queens of the Stone Age, to Nine Inch Nails and the Mars Volta. He has an easily recognizable style that screams sharp edge cool. Bold and bawdy, Taylor’s pieces use vivid colour to create a cut-out-comic-like feel reminiscent of old movie posters from the 1930s and 40s.

Having just finished a collaboration with Marchesa, jewellery designer Pamela Love’s gothic-inspired line has been picked up by the likes of Erin Wasson, among other celebrity fans. Referencing both nature and science, Love has created a line that is both rock n’ roll and earthy, with talons, claws, peacocks, rams and bear heads all featuring heavily.

Chicago artist Damara Kaminecki (aka Damarak the Destroyer) creates the some seriously bad-ass woodcuts. With a darkly gothic, antique aesthetic, and subject matter tending towards ye old curiosity shop, Kaminecki has a body of work which truly stands out. I especially enjoy her recent dense, collage like compositions, which are such a fantastic juxtaposition of the old and new. It’s perfect eye candy. Be sure not to miss the incredible carved pumpkins in in her printmaking section, as well as her new blog, which I’ve already added to my feed.

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Travis Louie’s paintings are inspired by 19th-century portrait photographs. Instead of people, however, his subjects are goofy-looking monsters. His work is beyond mere art for children, however. There is a refined eeriness to his pieces that give them depth and an elusive quality that really makes them stand out.

Brazilian artist Walmor Correa does cryptozoological paintings of mermaids, cyclopses, anteater men, and a host of strange, fictional animal hybrids. As absurd and gothic as his subject matter is, he renders his paintings with impeccable subtlety and skill, creating magnificent and ethereal medical drawings that appeals to our core hope that there are parts of our world yet to be discovered.

I’ve been obsessed with Joel Peter Witkin’s photographs for a long time now. Witkin is famous for using deformed people, dwarves, hermaphrodites, and cadavers in his eerie, intricately composed photos that draw from religious iconography, Surrealism, and Baroque art. He’s been accused of being exploitative, but I think his pieces are quite beautiful, and he treats his subjects with respect and even reverence. The Nine Inch Nails’ video for Closer was inspired by Witkin’s art.

Dan Hiller mixes a gothic sensibility with a tribal roughness in his haunting watercolors and ink drawings of skulls and tree-headed figures. His mash-up of old Victorian engravings are simple but eerie, and have an almost logographic quality about them — they’re great tattoo ideas.

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