{illustrators} – Page 11

Weekend links 666

Muy Mago (Portrait of Aleister Crowley) (1961) by Xul Solar.

• “…snails amaze with their capacity to move so far, to spread so widely, while doing so little. This, it seems to me, is one of the real marvels of snail biogeography. Individuals do not need to exert great effort because natural selection has acted for them, acted on them, acted with them, to produce these beings that are so unexpectedly but uniquely suited to a particular form of deep time travel, drifting. From such a perspective, rather than being any kind of deficiency, the highly successful passivity of snails might be seen as a remarkable evolutionary achievement.” Thom van Dooren on how snails cross vast oceans.

• “Slow art has layers. And this is why it requires time and effort. We should see this as a good and necessary thing. If this is a kind of obstacle in the way of easy assimilation then it is an obstacle that is integral to the value of the thing itself. The mind is calmed, or disturbed, or made exultant by the art that rewards us for our goodwill and our capacity to take our time.” In Praise of Slow Art by Chris Horner.

• “I have set naturalism and the supernatural in binary opposition but perhaps there is a third way. Let’s call it the supranatural stance…” Paul Broks explores the roots of coincidence.

• At Unquiet Things: The art of Hector Garrido, an illustrator who specialised in the Gothic staple of women in gowns fleeing at night from sinister mansions.

• “The writer Jorge Luis Borges once referred to his friend the artist Xul Solar as ‘one of the most singular events of our era’,” writes Miriam Basilio.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Japanese craftsmanship meets Pokemon at Kanazawa’s National Crafts Museum.

• At Public Domain Review: Martin Frobenius Ledermüller’s Microscopic Delights (1759–63).

• New music: Rest Of Life by Steve Roach.

• The Four Horsemen (1972) by Aphrodite’s Child | Supper’s Ready (1972) by Genesis | Six Six Sixties (1979) by Throbbing Gristle

Shusei Nagaoka album covers

Out Of The Blue (1977) by Electric Light Orchestra.

Many different labels may be attached to the 1970s but it was definitely the science-fiction decade as much as anything else, a time when the use of SF imagery became a widespread trend, often superficially applied but there all the same. You see this in the music packaging of the period, and not only in the obvious enclaves of progressive rock. Here’s Motown Chartbusters Vol. 6 (1971) with a spaceship cover by Roger Dean; here’s Herbie Hancock on the cover of Thrust (1974) piloting his keyboard-driven craft over Machu Picchu while an alarmingly swollen Moon seems ready to crash into the Earth.

Out Of The Blue gatefold interior.

The exploitation of SF imagery on the covers of funk, soul and disco albums was much more widespread than the jazz world, and lasted long enough to join up with the emergence of synth-pop and electro in the early 1980s. The meticulous airbrush paintings of Shusei Nagaoka dominate this era and idiom, thanks in part to his covers for two of the biggest albums of 1977: Out Of The Blue by Electric Light Orchestra, and All ’n All by Earth, Wind & Fire.

All ’n All (1977) by Earth, Wind & Fire.

The latter doesn’t look especially science-fictional until you flip it over and its Egyptian scene morphs into a futuristic cityscape with a fleet of rockets heading for the stars. (That pyramidal building is based on one of Paolo Soleri’s hexahedron megastructures.) Many of the albums that followed this pair were jumping on the post-Star Wars/Close Encounters SF bandwagon but there were other reasons for funk and disco artists to embrace the Space Age, as Jon Savage has noted: “Disco’s stateless, relentlessly technological focus lent itself to space/alien fantasies which are a very good way for minorities to express and deflect alienation: if you’re weird, it’s because you’re from another world. And this world cannot touch you.”

Munich Machine (1977) by Munich Machine. (A Giorgio Moroder production.)

Nagaoka was in demand for his cover art even before hitching a ride to the top of the album charts so what you see here is a limited selection. As usual, there’s more to be seen at Discogs although I often wish they’d allow larger image uploads. Future Life magazine ran a feature about Nagaoka in October 1978 which includes a brief interview with the artist together with some biographical details.

Mandré Two (1978) by Mandré.

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Weekend links 663

Weird Tales celebrates its centenary this month (although the first issue was on the shelves in February, 1923). Thirty years later, one of the last issues from the initial run had Slime by Joseph Payne Brennan as the story featured on its cover. The magazine maintained a viscous consistency if nothing else. Tentacular art by RR Epperly.

• A big surprise in yesterday’s Bandcamp Friday was the announcement of Singularity, a new album by synth ensemble Node. Or new-ish since the previously unreleased recording is almost 30 years old:

Singularity is the legendary “lost” Node album. Recorded at the same time as their original sessions in 1994 this has DiN stalwart Dave Bessell join Buller & Flood alongside original member Gary Stout who was later replaced by Mel Wesson for the two DiN releases. Presented here for the first time, mastered to modern standards but otherwise untouched and in its original form and recorded to two track with no overdubs.

Node have never been very prolific—two decades separate their first album from their second—so this was very welcome. The new release includes a bonus addition of the 16-minute version of Terminus, one of their best pieces which has only been available previously on a scarce CD-single.

• Steven Watson at Print Mag on skeuomorphic magazine design that turns print into play. Now I want to design a book that fits inside a cassette box.

• RIP jazz giant Wayne Shorter, and David Lindley, co-founder of one of my favourite psychedelic groups, the incredible Kaleidoscope.

• S. Elizabeth at Unquiet Things on The Sensitive Plant, a poem by Percy Shelley illustrated by Charles Robinson.

• Christopher Parker at Smithsonian Magazine asks “Did Salvador Dalí paint this enigmatic artwork?” Yes, he did.

• Tangerine Dream in 1973 playing Atem live (with pre-recorded drums) on Spotlight, an Austrian TV show.

• New music: Mohanam by Shakti, and Area Code 601 by William Tyler & The Impossible Truth.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Bento boxes inspired by notable Japanese architecture.

• At Tentaclii: Ian Miller cover art for metal albums.

• Northern lights seen across the UK.

• New Blue Ooze (1970) by Kaleidoscope | Ooze Out And Away, Onehow (1986) by Harold Budd/Simon Raymonde/Robin Guthrie/Elizabeth Fraser | Ooze (1986) by 23 Skidoo

Parapsychology by Moebius

I always enjoy seeing illustrations by Moebius but they haven’t always been easy to find, even today when his international popularity has grown but his comics still overshadow his work in other areas. La Parapsychologie et Vous, a book by Paule Salomon and Charlie Cooper, was published in 1980 and illustrated throughout by Moebius. According to a note by Jean-Marc Lofficier, Moebius had been introduced to Salomon by Jean-Paul Appel-Guéry, a French New-Age figure who I think may be the “guru” whose influence over Moebius in the 1980s is referred to rather scathingly by Jodorowsky in the Moebius Redux documentary.

Whatever the circumstances that led to the commission, I love these illustrations which manage to honour the theme of the book while being typical products of their creator’s imagination. It’s also good to see further examples of Moebius adding screentone (aka Letratone or Zip-A-Tone) to his drawings. Moebius and Jodorowsky’s The Eyes of the Cat (1978) was created using the same technique, but elsewhere his black-and-white art is usually shaded by hand, if it’s shaded at all.

All these illustrations are taken from Chaos (1991), a collection of Moebius illustrations and other one-off pieces which may be seen in full here. I’ve not seen a copy of La Parapsychologie et Vous so I can’t say whether this is a complete set of drawings; there’s at least one other picture, showing someone floating in a chair, that seems to be from the same series. In addition to book reprints, the drawings were also reprinted a few years ago as a portfolio set for collectors.

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The Poster: An Illustrated Monthly Chronicle

Art by Mosnar Yendis.

This is the kind of thing I love to find: five volumes of a British magazine devoted to poster artists and their creations being published at a time—1898 to 1900—when the Art Nouveau style was spreading its convolvulus-like tendrils across Europe. Poster art is a predominantly commercial medium which means the articles are more concerned with the mechanics of the business than you’d find in a rival publication such as The Studio. Artists (male and female) are interviewed, trends are analysed, there are at least two features examining what the magazine calls “cribbing” (or one poster swiping from another), also a profile of the “Aerograph”, an early model of that fixture of 20th-century illustration, the airbrush. And when it comes to illustration, The Poster is as much concerned with the practice as with the posters themselves when so many of the people featured were also illustrating books or magazines. The publishers’ admiration of Aubrey Beardsley’s work is shown in the amount of mentions he receives as well as the articles they run. Beardsley had died a few months before the magazine was launched but his influence and reputation was firmly established by this time.

All five volumes of The Poster contain a wealth of pictorial material so, with the exception of the Sidney Sime drawing, the examples shown here are from the first volume alone. Below you’ll find two illustrations by Charles Robinson pastiching the Beardsley style which the magazine claims are the best imitations they’ve seen, a debatable opinion but I hadn’t seen the drawings before. The first volume also includes an interview with illustrator John Hassall, a name that few people today would recognise, while those that do may confuse him with similarly-named musicians. Hassall’s work is still known to many Britons, however, via his “Jolly Fisherman“, a poster for the Great Northern Railway promoting the seaside resort of Skegness. The Cinderella picture below is one of many Hassall pieces in the magazine.

• The Poster, Volume 1
• The Poster, Volume 2
• The Poster, Volume 3
• The Poster, Volume 4
• The Poster, Volume 5

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