{art} – Page 605 – { feuilleton }

JG Ballard book covers

In a similar vein to the Burroughs cover gallery, Rick McGrath’s site does the same for one of Burroughs’ followers, JG Ballard. The covers below are two typical examples using Surrealist art as their illustration, The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst and City of Drawers by Dalí. I’ve always loved the pairing of Ernst’s painting (my favourite by that artist) with The Crystal World, a design that Panther carried over to their 1968 paperback edition.

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• The book covers archive

William Burroughs book covers

This site has a great selection of Burroughs’ cover art. By no means complete but pages like this are always fascinating for showing the variety of visual interpretations that can be brought to a single title. Also nice to see how books looked in their earlier editions before they achieved status as “classic” works. And sometimes you see odd book title variations, so Queer in some foreign editions has become Pederast.

Too many great designs to choose from so I’ve picked out a couple of favourites by Thomi Wroblewski for Picador editions of the early Eighties. Cities of the Red Night remains my favourite Burroughs novel and I still toy with the idea of doing an illustrated edition one day.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The William Burroughs archive

20 Sites n Years by Tom Phillips

Tom Phillips has long been one of my favourite contemporary artists and he’d certainly be my candidate for one of the world’s greatest living artists even though the world at large stubbornly refuses to agree with this opinion. Phillips’ problem (if we have to look for problems) would seem to be an excess of talent in an art world that doesn’t actually like people to be too talented at all (unless they’re dead geniuses like Picasso) and a lack of the vaunting ego that propels others into the spotlight.

Phillips is predominantly a painter but a restlessly experimental one. On my journey through the London galleries in May I visited the National Portrait Gallery, a rather dull place mostly filled with pictures of the rich and famous by the rich and famous. There were two Tom Phillips works on display in different rooms, inadvertently showing his artistic range: one, a fairly standard (if very finely detailed) portrait of Iris Murdoch, the other a computer screen showing a portrait of Susan Adele Greenfield which manifested as an endlessly-changing series of 169 processed drawings and video stills. One work was static and traditional, the other fluid, contemporary and unlike anything else in the building.

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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

New things for August

A couple of updates to the site this month. Firstly there’s another interview with Eroom Nala focussing on life, art and (inevitably) my forthcoming Haunter of the Dark book.

And I’ve finally got round to expanding the line of CafePress products (T-shirts and a larger poster print) for my Kabbalah poster which seems to be my most popular work judging by sales there. This surprises me seeing as it was done on a whim in 2000 after a visit to London. Alan Moore later used it in an issue of Promethea but I don’t know whether the people interested in it are Promethea fans or some of the new breed of Kabbalists.

I’ll be adding more products for other lines, and some new things, as time permits over the next few weeks.

Update: CafePress have decided that my artwork may need “copyright clearance”. So don’t bother trying to buy anything just yet.

Update 2: CafePress tell me that “Transport for London provided us with a notice stating that the use of the London Underground Roundel infringes upon their intellectual property rights”. I presume this means now I’ll have to amend the artwork to remove the offending article. Copyright hell: it’s the wave of the future. Get used to it. See this Boing Boing post for a good example of London Transport’s dead hand.

Update 3: Products reworked with slightly amended artwork although for some reason the page is still showing the old items.