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The art of Stella Langdale, 1880–1976

Nocturne (aquatint; no date).

One of Callum‘s recent book postings alerted me to the work of Stella Langdale, an artist and illustrator I hadn’t come across before. Judging from online listings her obscurity would seem to be a result of not having being as productive as some of her contemporaries, and her drawings are a deal more gloomier than the delicate pen-and-ink style that was common in book illustration at the time. But it’s her brooding charcoal masses which I find appealing. As with the better Gustave Doré illustrations, they adumbrate more than they depict by the use of careful composition. Some of her other works are aquatints, a form of etching which allows for similar effects to the graded atmospheres of charcoal.

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The art of Michael Goro

Voyage de Nuit (etching/engraving; no date).

Michael Goro’s etchings and engravings are rich with the kind of gritty urban verisimilitude I love. His site has several more examples and there’s a good interview with the artist here.

Michael Goro, a prominent intaglio printmaker, has lived and worked in Russia, Europe, Israel, and the U.S. His work has received a number of prestigious international awards including Special Prize at the 1998 International Print Triennial in Kanagawa, Japan and Excellent Prize at the 2006 14th Seoul Space International Print Biennial at the Seoul Museum of Art (Korea). He describes his art as a “continuous creative search for raw authenticity in urban environments and human forms that are constantly changing.” Utilizing the full spectrum of printmaking techniques, ranging from Renaissance engraving to digital photogravure, he shares his unique personal experiences through imaginative imagery.

Thanks to PK for the tip!

Reflections (etching; no date).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Lovecraftian horror at Maison d’Ailleurs

A slight return to the Lovecraft art exhibition that’s now running at Maison d’Ailleurs, the museum of science fiction, utopia and extraordinary journeys in Yverdon-Les-Bains, Switzerland. As mentioned last month, An Exhibition of Unspeakable Things: Works inspired by HP Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book includes my large digital work based on the lines “Mirage in time—image of long-vanish’d pre-human city”.

Curator Patrick Gyger has now posted two sets of photos of the exhibition on Flickr. My picture can be seen on this page and for Lovecraft art aficionados the 128pp catalogue should be along soon, featuring 90 illustrations and original fiction by Paul Di Filippo, Jeffrey Ford, Lucius Shepard, Norman Spinrad and others.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Harlan Ellison: Dreams with Sharp Teeth

Harlan Ellison.

“You have somebody who is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.”

Neil Gaiman on Harlan Ellison, and so say all of us. The quote comes from a trailer for Dreams with Sharp Teeth, a new documentary about Ellison’s life and work which, as far as I can tell, has yet to acquire any distribution. Given Ellison’s reputation you have to wonder why it’s taken this long for someone to make a substantial film about such a great artist and natural performer.

“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman, from a 1978 portfolio by Jim Steranko.

But it doesn’t arrive a moment too soon given the quantity of recent web discussion which seems to have forgotten his huge body of work and sees him solely as a person who gets into arguments all the time. He’s always been argumentative, of course, splendidly so, and his take-no-prisoners attitude did much to shake up the conservative world of American science fiction in the late Sixties and early Seventies. As a political commentator he’s always been at the Hunter S Thompson level with a great line in witty vituperation. The filmmakers seem to have caught both sides of Ellison, the writer who doesn’t so much read as perform his texts from memory, and the tightly-wound ball of fury who won’t take shit from anyone. The film site has nearly an hour of clips to watch, including a tremendous speed-reading of Prince Myshkin, and Hold the Relish.

And while we’re on the subject, I’ll give another plug to the landmark collection of HP Lovecraft-derived art due to appear soon from Centipede Press. This features a number of my Lovecraftian works and an introduction from Mr Ellison himself.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Bradbury Building: Looking Backward from the Future
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

Ave Atque Vale!

Aubrey Beardsley illustrates Catullus for The Savoy, no. 7 (1896).

Farewell then, Mister Aitch, now he’s decided to call it a day at the wonderful and unique Giornale Nuovo. He’d been blogging (must we call it that? It seems we must…) for five years which probably makes him first generation in the concentrated timescale of web-existence. Five years is a long time to be doing anything never mind regularly throwing hard-won morsels of research to the browsing hordes.

His posts will be missed here since it was his journal, along with a handful of others (Bldg Blog, The Nonist, BibliOdyssey among them), which confirmed for me that this discipline could have a purpose beyond mere diaristic vanity, something I enjoy reading but had no desire to engage in myself. One of the specialist concerns at Giornale Nuovo was the etching or engraving and Mister Aitich managed to cover this area so comprehensively I frequently found that artists I’d considered writing about were already discussed there in far greater detail than I could summon the energy (or the book resources) for myself. Those book resources are a thing of wonder and I remain eternally jealous of Mister Aitch’s library.

Happily Giornale Nuovo will remain online as an archive, which is good to hear. This raises again the spectre of what’s to happen to all this energy and activity when we let it go. Books regularly outlive their creators but all these fragile electronic media are dependent on the whims of webhosts and developing technology. Do we want this work to survive for the benefit of future historians or not? Or should we celebrate it as ephemeral and transient? What happens when the web advances beyond Unix networks, PHP and HTML? The British Library has already expanded its deposit scheme to encompass electronic works but online publications differ from their paper equivalent in that the publisher—legally obliged in the UK to send one copy of every printed volume to the British Library—is invariably also the author. What happens if the author dies before they have a chance to submit their work which then sinks into the swamp of a billion other weblogs? When do you decide to submit a work which is forever unfinished?

I’ll leave those questions to librarians and the scholars at the Long Now Foundation who consider some of the issues presented by the prospective obsolescence of present technology. In the meantime we’ll raise a farewell toast to Mister Aitch and wish him all the very best. Don’t be hesitant in browsing his archives, there’s a wealth of eclectic, eccentric and neglected culture there deserving of your attention.