We’re leaving Beardsley country. Taking the old dirt road off Harry Clarke county, on thru the inky backwoods and the old lost village long grown green and rotten with tree and weed, towards a place called Vania Zouravliov. The sky’s dark, and there’s movement among the trees that grow too close together to give any idea what that movement might be other than it’s something watching, something waiting. And you know pretty soon you’re going be meeting this something one way or another and the thought of it sends a cold ripple of excitement through your backbone as you push on ahead wanting to get there faster. That’s kinda like the feeling I get when I look at the artwork of Vania Zouravliov. Zouravliov is a Russian graphic artist based in London who draws sensuous, intricate pictures of beauty, death, sex, and decay. Born into an artistic family (his mother was an art teacher), Zouravliov was a child prodigy whose earliest works gained him considerable praise and some notoriety—“famous communist artists, godfathers of social realism, told him that his work was from the Devil.” He was drawing “evil hammerhead people” at the...