Tarot of mirrors

The Journey

I’m painting my own version of the tarot deck: all 78 cards, one at a time. Along every card is a text that explores some of the themes of the card or the creative process.

The Tarot sits weirdly comfortably at the center of a lot of my interests. It’s this curious carry-on piece of non-serial, ergodic visual art. It’s a self-curating autobiography and a mirror to the subconscious. Like a kaleidoscope to the subconscious. While I love printed 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.

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 art

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. Here's a selection of some of my favourite album covers from that work.

Beaten to Death, 2024

Sunrise Over Rigor Mortis

This is the cover for the latest Beaten to Death album, Sunrise Over Rigor Mortis. In tandem with the lyrics of the album, it's 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. I made a small edition of art prints of this cover in April. There's only a few left. Find me on instagram or send me an email if you're keen on purchasing one, the details are all on instagram.

Buster Sledge, 2023

Nice Time on Earth Today

Buster Sledge's third album, NToET, 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.

Grant the Sun, 2022

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, 2022

Dudes

This was the second cover I painted for the Norwegian scandirock-quartet Dudes. 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.

Buster Sledge, 2021

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 made the trip out and showed some paintings and sold prints.

Beaten To Death, 2020

Laat Maar, Ik Verhuis Naar Het Bos

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. To date, the most complicated release I've worked on yet.

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:

"Laat Maar..." gatefold

LMIVNHB: Center spread gatefold

This is the infamous gatefold, 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 twenty or thirty 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.

LMIVNHB: Digital EP Version

Laat Maar, Ik Verhuis Naar Het Bos
(Digital EP Release)

Digital media

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. The intent was for the expressive and immediate rendering to somehow echo the brutal intensity of the music itself.

Beaten to Death, 2018

Agronomicon

This was my first commission work for these guys. 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.

About

Bio

William Hay is a Norwegian visual artist known for his recognisable expressive style and often busy and colourful motifs. His work blends the visual languages of visual culture across sacred and profane traditions, with an eye towards synthesising symbolic visual culture into a modern language. His work is perhaps best known from album covers and commissioned paintings around the night life of Oslo. He is currently working out of a studio in his garden on a collection of eschatological traditional paintings and a deck of Tarot cards.

all images on this website and their copyrights belong to the artist William Hay.