Spooky Art to Inspire

Like many my age, my favorite holiday is Halloween. At this point, its cliché to love Halloween, but it won’t stop me from enjoying it. I love spooky things, and art inspires me, so I’ve gathered some of my favorite spooky paintings to show you.
Warning: this post contains art.
Trigger Warnings: depictions of death, bone, blood, body horror

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Hell by Hieronymus Bosch (1500-1504)

Bosch is known for his depictions of Hell. This depiction includes a river leading damnation, similar to the River Styx in Greek mythology.

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The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli (1781)

​Commonly used now to depict sleep paralysis, the work grabs so many people as it contains sexual tones and horror themes while not being explicit.

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​Night Travellers at a Cross by Laszlo Mednyanszky (1880)

​Mednyansky used a cross in the forest many times in his pieces as a representation of death. The color and lighting gives an enchantingly eerie atmosphere.

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Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette by Vincent van Gogh (1886)

An early work of van Gogh’s, he did this piece while studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp where he had to learn anatomy and the skeletal structure of humans. He later stated he learned nothing at the academy.

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Pyramid of Skulls by Paul Cezanne (1901)

Cezanne did several paintings that dealt with mortality during the last decade of his life. Many of his still lifes included skulls.

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