ABSTRACT
Aburod Terra (Uninhabited Earth) came about as a commission by Daniel Jeppsson as a cover for his music Hardcore/Gabber CD album/vinyl cover for his band Recall; I was hired to illustrate it back in November 2005. On 23 November, 2005 after finding my artwork on the Internet, he contacted me with a request for an album cover. His exact words were “For my record, that I want you to design, I need something DARK. The record will be called “DAY OF EVIL” so something like destroyed houses, after war, burning buildings, dead bodies in a city landscape would look great. It needs to be minimum 30×30cm at 300 dpi.” He also provided me with links of my paintings, which he liked, requesting a similar style, colors and composition (Fig.01a–c). This painting fits into my series/style of work entitled Dreaminism – romantically apocalyptic dreams of the twenty-first hour at the dawn of the twenty-second century, depicting visions of the future that will inevitably come to pass if mankind’s planet-wide industrial and war machine isn’t stopped in time. This theme is inspired by my travels through the world and my life in Soviet Russia. I have stood witness to a fall of a nation and great noble ideals. I have seen Russian cities ravaged by human carelessness, industrialization, depression, oppression, crime and war. I have seen science fail and unleash death in the dark cases of Chernobyl and the Aral Sea “accidents”. My vision is that of a romantic artist, with one exception – to showcase not just the destructive power of nature, but also the destructive power of science and human kind.
