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The art of Gérard Trignac

Gérard Trignac produces etchings of a kind I’d most likely be doing myself if I wasn’t otherwise occupied, detailed architectural fantasies that owe a lot to my sainted Piranesi and (I’m guessing, since they’re both French) Charles Méryon. As usual with contemporary artists of this nature one can find the pictures but information about the artist is harder to come by. A web search reveals this:

Gérard Trignac was born in 1955, and initially trained to become an architect—training which is evident in his imagined cityscapes. Each of his prints begins with a detailed sketch, which is then fully developed on the copper plate. Each print can take months to complete. Besides individual prints, Trignac has often turned his talents to series of prints used to illustrate classic texts by authors such as Calvino, Borges, and others. His work is in the collection of numerous museums and public collections in Europe and the United States.

The wonderful (French-only) Egone.net has an artist’s quarter with two Trignac portfolios (scroll to the bottom of the page—and look at some of the other work while you’re there). Work by Gérard’s sister, Colette, is also featured. Other print collections can be found here, here and here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Russian Utopia

Glass Stonehenge: Monument for the Year 2001 (1986) by D Bush and A Khomyakov.

“The sheet of heavy glass laying on the row of stones is carrying the next row, etc.”

Russian Utopia is a repository of 480 unbuilt architectural projects from the last 300 years of Russian history. I love seeing designs for unrealised architectural schemes and this site has some fascinating examples like the Glass Stonehenge above. A shame all the pictures are so frustratingly small.

Temple-City (1987) by I Galimov.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

The art of Heinrich Kley, 1863–1945

See Kley’s amorous centaurs, racing snails and battling ogres here.

Die Belastungsprobe.

The Engineer’s Dream.

Austin Osman Spare

Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of one of my favourite artists, Austin Osman Spare.

Like many people in the 1970s, I was introduced to the work of Austin Spare by Man, Myth and Magic, a seven volume “illustrated encyclopedia of the supernatural” published weekly in 120 112 parts by Purnell. My mother was a Dennis Wheatley reader so we had a couple of occult paperbacks in the house, among them one of William Seabrook‘s accounts of voodoo in Haiti and a copy of Richard Cavendish’s wonderful magical primer, The Black Arts, (later retitled The Magical Arts). Cavendish had been chosen as editor of Man, Myth and Magic and included occultist and writer Kenneth Grant on his editorial staff, a decision that gave the book’s producers access to Grant’s collection of Spare pictures. In a rather bold move, they launched Man, Myth and Magic in 1970 with a detail of a Spare drawing on the cover, a work often referred to as The Elemental although the authoritative Spare collection, Zos Speaks has it titled as The Vampires are Coming. It’s a shame that AOS didn’t live for a few more years to see this; after labouring in poverty and obscurity for most of his life he would have found his work flooding Britain, with this first issue on sale all over the country and the cover picture being pasted on billboards and sold as posters. It’s possible there were even television adverts for the book (although I don’t recall any), since there usually were for expensive part works like this.