William Hay is a Norwegian visual artist based in Oslo. He is known for his expressive, busy and figurative style, employing vivid colours and surrealist motifs. His work carries echoes of the visual language and symbolism of our past, revitalising it through a contemporary vernacular of expressive brushwork, aspiring to employ the duplicity of images in rendering the inherent moral paradoxes of the human existence, at the risk of being unclear.
For the moment, he is working on a series of Tarot cards and adjacent paintings, kneading the semiotics of psychoanalysis and esoteric mythology into psychedelic arabesques of meaning.
The Tarot
A painted deck of cards
In december of 2023, I started painting a tarot deck of my own. It's a full set of 78 small paintings, all in a 2:1 ratio. For me, it's a leviathan undertaking or a herculean labour. Every week brings me closer to a full set.
Why the Tarot?
Weirdly nested at the overlap of many of my interests, the Tarot is an eclectic and irresistable . It’s this curious carry-on piece of non-serial, ergodic visual art. It’s a self-curating autobiography and a kaleidoscope to the subconscious. While I love wall-hanged art and paintings, there's something about being able to carry a whole gallery's worth of little artworks in your bag that is irresistible to me.
When's it due?
The project started in December of 2023, and is estimated to finish sometime late 2024, early 2025. As I progress, I’ll be releasing prints of the individual cards. Sign up for my monthly newsletter or follow me on instagram if you want to keep abreast of what's going on.
Album Covers
Mercenary Work
Over the years I've been blessed with a bunch of great collaborative efforts, desigining album covers and painting artwork for local bands. I've gathered some of my favourites here.
Beaten To Death
Sunrise Over Rigor Mortis (2024)
Behind here is the cover for the latest Beaten to Death album, Sunrise Over Rigor Mortis. In tandem with the lyrics of the album, I like to think of it as a meditation on the inevitabilities of existence and the absurdity of life as we hurtle downstreams on the river of dying.
The cover wraps around the album, front to back, which means it shelves "the wrong way around", either facing right with the spine out, or facing left with the opening out. I'm sure that's annoying to someone out there, but I can't imagine why someone like that would buy this music.
Singles
Leading up to the release, I painted three digital single covers, basking in the apocalyptic vibes of the album. All the colours and landscapes were deeply inspired by the desolation of the island of Andøya in the north, where my partner had just collected a lot of material.
Laat Maar, Ik Verhuis Naar Het Bos (2020)
This was pretty weird release. The vinyl itself is a 45rpm double-vinyl gatefold release, and then the digital release is a series of 4 EPs, all in a different order.
There's also a single vinyl reprint and a special CD edition made for the Japanese market, bafflingly. Easily the most complicated release I've worked on.
When we started talking about the cover, I was convinced we ought to distance ourselves from the previous one. Last
The brief for the artwork was doing something in the veins of Bosch and Bruegel. Perhaps ill-advised from a marketing perspective, we went with a very low chroma front and back piece, as an overt reference to the Garden of Earthly Delights diptyche, which itself has a modest cover in grisaille that folds out into a vibrant scene:
See here the infamous gatefold from Laat Maar, all painstakingly handpainted in photoshop. The brief was something inspired by Bruegel and Bosch, and lockdown had just hit. It truly was the best of times and the worst of times.
The painting itself took some unnamed amount of hours, all things considered. I kept starting it over and over, as I kept being ambushed by the sheer workload, and second-guessing the main compostions. It's almost beyond comprehension to me how the old masters were able to do it.
Laat Maar, Ik Verhuis Naar Het Bos (Digital EP Release)
Contributing to the weirdness of the album, four digital EPs were made of the tracks from the album, but differently mixed and released for streaming-only. Since the prescient theme of the album was ways of rejecting society to live in the woods, we decided to do these four unique woods as what I like to call landscape portraits -- square format inventions of real landscapes.
The four forests of the digital release of Laat Maar, Ik Verhuis Nar Het Bos were painted in digital media under a time constraint, I believe it was 30 minutes, to keep a consistent style while making up for all the time spent on the gatefold.
The four forests, to me, seemed to represent four cardinal directions of yearning, as referenced in the album title: The planted, once artificial but now very much canonical forest of Mastbos, the serene beauty of the eerie Aokigahara, the thoroughly wandered and pathcrossed Østmarka, and the fully fictitious forest planet of Endor.
Painting them was a blast; explosive and intense. The intent was for the expressive and immediate rendering to somehow echo the brutal intensity of the music itself.
Agronomicon
This release marks the first collaboration with me and the band. The concept of the album was "dealing with the agronomic/food crisis through black magic". After a sleugh of botched attempts, I went with a pink goat in a vaguely pentagram shape, and we all wound up loving it. The t-shirt of this was a particular success, being one of the few white and pink grindcore t-shirts out there.
Buster Sledge
Buster Sledge and I started working together in 2021, with the cover art for their second album "Call Home". I made prints of the album cover, and a gallery pop-up at the end the release tour. For our second collaboration, I did the cover in traditional mediums, oils on wooden board, with a dozen miniature digital paintings on the back.
Nice Time on Earth Today | oil on mdf | 2023 (Private collection)
Nice Time on Earth Today
Buster Sledge's third album was a treat to work on. A physical painting seemed the best route to take for the vibe we were after, marrying a modernist, stroke-and-texture oriented painterly style with a more rigid and mystical pictoral space inspired by medieval woodcuts and american quiltwork.
The back of the album features twelve unique painted panels that further reference the lyrical content of the album.
Call Home
Buster Sledge's second album, Call Home, was my first work with the band. I knew of Michael from beforehand, and we hit it off creatively and had a good, long creative process on this cover.
At the tail of their release tour, they played a show at an art gallery overlooking the gorgeous Hardangerfjord, where we took a daytrip, showing paintings and prints.
Grant the Sun
Voyage
Oslo-based postmetal band Grant The Sun asked me to do the cover for their first album. They had a concrete motif in mind, and they had a mascot and everything. A super experience, I got to play around with gorgeous colours whilst marinating in the goosebumps of my thalassophobia.
The album itself came out looking and sounding absolutely gorgeous, and I'm proud of my part in it. There's even a gorgeous white t-shirt of it.
Dudes
"Dudes"
This was the second cover I painted for the Norwegian scandirock-quartet Dudes, and is the cover for their debut album release. This was painted very recently after I started exploring classical playing card illustration styles. The band wanted me to create "something really cool", and here's where we wound up.
Stickers of this cover are all over pub restrooms in Oslo now, which is a very weird source of pride for me.
Single covers
We also made these three single covers in the warmup to the album release. I think it was around this album that I started seriously considering making my own tarot deck.
all images and their copyrights belong to the artist.
