Behind The Artworks: NORILSK - Weepers Of The Land (2018)

We do like to insert artistic references in our music and our artworks; in the present case, we adopted a Canadian winter genre scene. For Weepers of the Land, we used a painting from William Blair Bruce (1859-1906) with the kind permission of the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Originally titled the Phantom Hunter, it was painted in 1888 and inspired by a poem by Charles Dawson Shanly (1811-1875), The Walker of the Snow. This is the original artwork which was reinterpreted, in 2017, by artist Sam Ford for our album Le passage des glaciers. Because the two albums were recorded at the same time, and because Weepers of the Land can be seen as the companion album to last year’s, we chose to develop the concept for both artworks in parallel--just like we did for our first EP Japetus, released in 2014, and our first full length The Idea of North, in 2015. Aside from being set in a Nordic environment, we chose this painting for Weepers of the Land because it conveys the eerie, heavy, and beautifully solitary character in experiencing our music.