A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Contradiction: Oberon and Titania (1854–58). Richard Dadd painting Contradiction, c. 1856. Of all the paintings based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream my favourite is this one by Richard Dadd (1817–1886), the artist who famously murdered his father in a fit of psychosis and spent the rest of his days as an inhabitant of Bethlem Royal … Continue reading “A Midsummer Night’s Dadd”
Flags of the Undiscovered Planets: 3 (1985) by César Manrique. • “That mysterious font is Festive, not Stymie.” Ray Newman goes looking for a typeface that immediately says “Britain in the 1950s”. I used to refer to one of its relatives as “the launderette font”, although it was also a common sight on shopfronts, public … Continue reading “Weekend links 723”
Grosses Wasser (1979) by Cluster. Cover art by Dieter Moebius. • RIP Dieter Moebius: one half of Cluster (with Hans-Joachim Roedelius), one third of Harmonia (with Roedelius and Michael Rother), and collaborator with many other musicians, including Brian Eno and Conny Plank. Geeta Dayal, who interviewed Moebius for Frieze in 2012, chose five favourite recordings. … Continue reading “Weekend links 269”
1: A slang phrase Postcard via. From the Oxford English Dictionary: skidoo, v. N. Amer. slang. (ski’du:) Also skiddoo. [Orig. uncertain, perh. f. skedaddle v.] 2. In catch-phrases. a. Used as an exclamation of disrespect (for a person). Esp. in nonsense association with twenty-three. (temporary.) 1906 J. F. Kelly Man with Grip (ed. 2) 99 … Continue reading “23 Skidoo”
A statue of the Great God Pan looks down on the teeming chaos of Joseph Noel Paton’s The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania (1849), one of many 19th-century paintings based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Paton’s canvas gives Richard Dadd a run for his money in its wealth of incident and grotesque detail (see the … Continue reading “Midsummer”