Since blogging here has become sporadic I find myself continually playing catch-up. Recent arrivals in the book department have included two art-related items that feature work of mine. The first is the catalogue for the Things To Come exhibition which ended last month at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel. When I posted photos of the exhibition back in May I was wondering about the identity of the curious iridescent structure occupying the gallery floor. This turns out to be a piece from 2015 by Netaly Aylon entitled Armour (Disappearing Methods). The same artist is also responsible for the cover of the catalogue, an homage to SF illustrator Frank R. Paul. I’ve always admired the wild inventiveness of Paul’s work so approve of the choice. There’s more Paul (and many other artists, past and present) inside the catalogue.
The booklet design by Yon Shavit cleverly solves the need to present bi-lingual information by having the English text run from the front while the Hebrew equivalent runs from the back. The artist pages feature both languages.
Book design by Emmanuel Dubois.
The other arrival was Portraits de Dorian Gray: Le texte, le livre, l’image by Xavier Giudicelli, a lavish, 404-page study from the Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne examining representations of Dorian Gray across various media. Xavier had already written about my illustrations based of Oscar Wilde’s novel for a French academic journal, Imaginaires. The book reprises that piece in the wider context of the many other adaptations of the novel. The text is French so much of the discussion is beyond me but the pictorial content is profuse, and includes many illustrations I’ve never seen before. Xavier says he’s already had an enquiry about a possible English edition so I’m hoping this goes ahead.
In addition to reproducing two of my pages from the Graphic Canon adaptation, Xavier illustrates my comments with photos of Whistler’s Peacock Room and Sargent’s portrait of W. Graham Robertson, a painting I used as the model for Basil Hallward’s portrait.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• More Things to Come
• Things to Come
• Foreign appearances
• Picturing Dorian Gray