Elena Unger is a young, up and coming artist from Vancouver, BC with an eye for the melancholy and the chaotic. Her pieces are shifting and sweeping landscapes of darkness that invoke the cold, bleak terror at the heart of black metal. Looking at her work, I can feel the chill of the icy winds, and the fires of hell at my feet. Her paintings have a softness to the strokes, but it isn’t a comforting embrace; instead, it is the blur of a nightmare unfolding before your mind’s eye, the haze of a drugged vision, the blind loss of control of one’s fears. There is a war-like element to her subject matter, calling out humanity for our gang mentality and our barbarity to this world. We have given birth to monsters and we nurture their evil, turning the blighted remains of nature against us as we march away from our desecrated home. The emotion in these paintings strikes deep, and I look forward to the future of her work. Check out some of her paintings here, and get in touch with her via her site.