Richey Beckett, one of our favorite artists and creator of the incredible “The Call of Ktulu” poster back in 2015, recently suffered a traumatic, life-changing experience of tearing a retina.

Photo Credit: Jimmy Hubbard
When I read that Richey Beckett had lost vision in his right eye, I was floored. It isn’t the sort of news you expect. Instantly, my mind hurtled into that weird space where you try to imagine what it must be like and how much harder it must be when your world predominantly revolves around translating what you see and imagine into a piece of physical art.
As I prepared to speak with Richey, I tried to figure out how to ask. Or whether I should ask at all! I decided to ask him if he wanted to discuss it. He said he was fine doing so. Though later, Richey would reveal that he’d been reluctant since he’d essentially been hibernating from the world since January. But he’d found himself feeling upbeat and inspired in talking about it. I was comforted to hear this, given how difficult these topics are to address at all, let alone publicly.
One night, I was about to go to bed, and I noticed a weird visual anomaly in the lower edge of my right eye’s vision, a small gray patch where I couldn’t see this little sliver. I was a little troubled by it and mentioned it to my wife, but I figured maybe it’d go away and be fine in the morning.
As often happens with these things, I woke up the next morning, and it hadn’t gone away. I called the optician, who said, “Don’t even come in to see us. Hop in the car, go straight to A&E, go to the eye department, and tell them what’s happening.” So, I ended up in A&E all day having my eyes photographed, and they told me pretty quickly there was a tear in the retina, a hole forming, which meant it was gonna progress incredibly quickly, and they got me straight into surgery as fast as they could.
This was early January, and I’d only just returned from a trip to the States. I would’ve been in deep shit if I’d still been out there when it happened because I would’ve got stuck, unable to fly due to the surgery, and I wouldn’t have had any health care. So, thankfully, I was at least back on home turf.
You hear about a tear in the retina, and unless you’re an ophthalmologist, the chances are you can’t quite nail exactly which part of your eye the retina is and how it works. Richey can educate you.
The retina is like a concave projector screen at the back of your eyeball that captures images projected through your lens. A tear had formed in mine, and ultimately, that tear was gonna continue to get larger very quickly until it detached completely from the vitreous, which is the jelly-like matter that takes up the main central mass of your eye. When that happens, the eye won’t function anymore; you’ll lose vision.
I feel safe in assuming that eye surgery is a traumatic thought for pretty much everyone. Richey indeed confirms that to be the case for him.
The surgery is very quick, but it’s brutally intrusive. They give you a local anesthetic in your eyeball! Once they do the laser work at the back of the eye, they inject a gas bubble into your eyeball. Immediately after that, I got the eye-patched up.
Recovery seems no picnic, either.
Post-op, you need to spend a solid week leaning forward and face-down 50 minutes of every hour of every day for a week so the gas bubble can rise up and put pressure on the retina at the back of the eye. The recovery is intense. I came out with that big patch on my eye, then they took it off the next day, and… oh my God… the white of the eye was solid red and green. It was not just bruised but also swollen and bulging around the pupil, which is weird. Pretty rough. People go through worse surgeries, but there’s something specific and so intimate about your eyes. It’s a major way we communicate with people, by looking into their eyes.

Photo Credit: Isla Hampson
It remains hard to fathom. An artist robbed – just like that – of the ability to express himself in the skin he knows. Yet here’s Richey, speaking so calmly and eloquently about it, looking physically fine on my Zoom screen, and sounding as positive as he did when I saw him in San Francisco at a poster show late last year. I find myself sniffing for the anger I would surely have but finding none.
I didn’t get particularly angry or upset about the situation, but it was extremely overwhelming.
You know when you make big plans, and the world just has other ideas? Well, as I said, I’d been out in the States, in San Francisco, then LA, and then I spent the whole of December in Florida in St. Petersburg, which is a great artistic hub. I met lots of amazing artists out there. I talked about getting out there to a mural because it’s the mural capital of the States. As far as I’m aware, it has more murals there than anywhere in the world, and there’s an event that happens once a year called the SHINE Mural Festival, where they invite incredible artists from all over.
I had also planned to start painting, which I’ve never done before. I mean, it sounds crazy, I know, and I have painted at some points in my life, but only maybe in art school. I’ve always been pretty committed to the pen and ink stuff. I felt that monotone, fine-line stippling kept me occupied and challenged for a very long time, which it always has and always will do. At the same time, with a lot of the posters and prints I was making, the final poster was not the original piece of art. There was this division between the original piece of art, which then gets scanned in and thrown in a drawer somewhere, and the screen print, which is the finished piece. So, I wanted to create a painting that looks like those screen prints.
My wife, Jo, is from St. Petersburg, so I treated my time there almost like an artist’s retreat. I went to Home Depot and bought a whole bunch of boards that I got cut up into different sizes, got gesso to prime the wood, and just experimented. There’s loads of incredible wildlife in Florida, and I ended up taking some photos of ibis [long-legged wading birds – ED]. I had one photo of an ibis I really liked, so I started painting that, not overthinking it and with no real meaning to it apart from thinking it was a cool thing that would translate as a painting.
That Richey found such joy in an ibis is of no surprise. Of all the artists I’ve met, he is the one who perhaps lives closest to the soil, the trees, the skulls. Richey’s raw. He’s raw and feral, the unkempt scragg on his face, the dirt under his fingernails, the glint in his eye (even now, even in that one, I can see it forcing its way through). That primal undercarriage is a platform for all he creates.
	
I’ve realized I’m quite aggressive in my execution. Not everyone does this, but I really press pretty hard with a pen when I’m drawing at any point, and I’ve always enjoyed that feeling. I almost approach it the way a tattooist works. I see tattooists kinda gritting their teeth because it’s so intense, trying to almost hold their breath and grit their teeth to get that line just right because they have to. I know the stakes for me drawing on a piece of paper are not the same as that, and I’m not comparing the two, but in terms of the approach, it feels similar. There’s something about the finality and high pressure of having to draw on paper and potentially fuck it up, and I will very much hold my breath, grit my teeth, really focus, and enjoy the tension of that.
Richey was looking forward to seeking that satisfaction in a paintbrush, trying to discover how he could remain so physical and visceral during his artistic process with an instrument not particularly cut out for such arduous use.
My plan was to come home and start this whole exciting new phase of, “I’m a painter now, I’m gonna start painting. No one’s gonna see this coming; no one knows I’m doing this stuff. I’m gonna be making art that’s sort of recognizable as mine, in my style, but in this new format where it’s these big original pieces.” I had all these ambitions – painting, doing art shows, all of these thematic things I was gonna pursue. And then suddenly, bang. You’re not gonna be able to draw for a good long time.
Generally, I’ve been in pretty high spirits about the whole thing despite having to cancel a lot of work and all of the connotations connected with potentially losing my vision and not being able to work.
Richey laughs, shrugs, and smiles. Bang – suddenly, indeed.

Photo Credit: Jimmy Hubbard
Whatever he says, believe me, it’s a big fucking deal. Put yourself in his shoes and see how grounded you feel about it. At least there does, thankfully, appear to be a chance of regaining good use of that eye once more. Right now, Richey can see something through it, though matters remain far from a decent prognosis.
The recovery period is ongoing. It happened about two months ago, and my eye now looks normal, but right now, my vision is like looking at a fairground mirror. It’s wobbly, and the straight lines are all crazy looking, so even if I could see enough to do other things, it’s not gonna be sharp enough to draw to the way that I’m used to.
I think it’s a truism to say that an artist never stops creating and never ceases to imagine projects and scenarios regardless of their current circumstances.
I imagined getting those boards that I was planning to paint on, choosing a subject matter, prepping the board, drawing a perfect line down the center, and then drawing using my good eye as best I could. Then maybe I’d wear a patch on that good eye - so I couldn’t even think about using it - and draw the other half of the same image with this fucked up kaleidoscopic eye and take it in a very intuitive way to see what happens. It would almost be like a weird game with myself, where I’m doing these two halves and then revealing the two together and seeing how cohesive it was. Or what it was, how it made me feel, or what it showed.
Sometimes, said current circumstances reignite old creative flames.
All of this has piqued my interest in getting back into making music. I played guitar in a band for years, but when the art really took over, I abandoned it.
I’ve currently got this knackered, old beaten-up piece of shit acoustic guitar that I got for 12 quid in a local market, and somehow it sounds beautiful. It’s got this warm, thick glow to it. People like John Baizley from Baroness and Brent Hinds from Mastodon have played it and agree. I’ve also got a Jazzmaster and an amp that I’d packed away for a while, so I pulled them out, got it all set up straightaway, and started working on some stuff.
My friend Jay played drums in one of the early versions of my old bands on our first record before getting into tattooing 15 years ago and moving to Dundee, Scotland. He has a musical project called Teethgrynder, and the thing that’s good for me is that if I want to contribute something to that project, I don’t have to obsess over it because it’s not my thing. I can just hop on his train for a bit and dabble, which is a lot of fun. So, we’re working on ideas for some sort of EP, which will be a direct collaboration between me and him.
We return to where the conversation started. The concept of recounting your trauma to a writer, therefore revisiting each painful step. I think it’s a massive act of courage to be so open.
I was just in my own little world, reclusively hibernating and healing, which is good and healthy, in a way, but can also be dangerous if you just shut yourself off from your outside greater circles. That was a part of it was wanting to address this publicly. A few people suggested I do a GoFundMe thing, but this is something that I should recover from and be okay with in the end. With that said, once I sat with the immediate realities of my life for a while, I had this realization that in terms of being an independent self-employed person, I could actually be in [financial] trouble because I’m not gonna be able to make any artwork for several months. So, I did a super fun raffle that worked out really well. And I also invited people to buy prints or merch if they wanted to.

Photo Credit: Richey Beckett
Everyone involved with Metallica wanted to support Richey. The idea to reprint Richey’s enormously successful 2015 piece, “The Call of Ktulu,” which has become a rarity, originated with Spider-Dan. Dan had been following his story and trying to find a way to help without requiring anything new from Richey. He then brought it to Alyssa on the merch team, who made it happen. Not one to sit and watch, Richey wanted to be sure that 2024’s “Ktulu” brought something new and unique to the table.
I was trying to figure out how I could do the “Ktulu” poster differently and ultimately landed on the idea of making it exclusively printed in silver metallic inks. There are no colors in there, only metallic inks of different shades. It doesn’t come across so much in an image; when you see it online, it’s gonna just look like a dark grayscale version of the image. But the physical print is gonna all be metallic ink, so in real life, you’ll see the reflective elements.
That Richey Beckett is loved and respected by so many is unsurprising, but of course, he doesn’t take an ounce of it for granted.
The support I’ve had has absolutely blown me away. There were so many people rallying together, so many people contributing and supporting and just saying really beautiful things. Amazingly, I also had a lot of artists in our circles who wrote to me saying the very same thing happened to them. And talking about how they got through it and how they dealt with it, giving me hope and saying, “It’s gonna get better, you’re gonna get through it, you’re gonna be fine.”
For what it’s worth, in Richey’s case, I think they’re right.