Category: {fantasy}

Fantasy

Imaginary maps by Francesca Berrini

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Us and Them (Torn Map Collage on Canvas).

At first glance, from afar, Berrini’s works look like a collection of high-quality maps and atlases with unfamiliar continents and geographic markings. As you examine the details of the maps a bit closer, and try to follow the geographic and geopolitical information displayed, you do a double-take as you realize that the maps themselves are actually constructed from minuscule pieces of other maps, forming new terrain, new geographies, and new names of places in entirely new languages. Berrini maintains the abstract language of maps, yet plays with our notions of their unspoken authority and overall usability.

By recycling different visions of the world, past and present, Berrini hopes to capture her nostalgia for the places that she has not been to. “The creation of maps has historically been a painstaking process, meticulously striving for accuracy. I aim to slowly create a separate world from the scraps of my current fascinations. I am reforming the world that is available to me piece by piece to reflect my imagination of what I do not know. A pointless precision beautifully mirroring nothing.”—Francesca Berrini

Via Design Observer.

• Unusual Cards by Francesca Berrini

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Voynich Manuscript
• The Codex Seraphinianus
• 20 Sites n Years by Tom Phillips
• The Atlas Coelestis of Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr

The art of Jacques Sultana

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Dies Irae.

Jacques Sultana is a French artist whose paintings of naked men are very well-realised—photo-realist almost—but like a lot of gay art don’t do much apart from say “here’s a naked man.” However, his site also has a small gallery of homoerotic fantasy drawings which are equally well-done and far more detailed and imaginative than one usually sees from gay artists. Some of these pictures remind me of Patrick Woodroffe’s highly-detailed and florid fantasy paintings.

Update: the site is still active but these particular drawings seem to have been removed.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
• The fantastic art archive

My pastiches

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Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #3 (1992).

Following from the post about an art forgery exhibition (and Eddie Campbell discussing his American Gothic cover for Bacchus), I thought I’d post some of my own forgeries, or pastiches as we call them when no deception is intended.

Reverbstorm was the Lord Horror comic series I was creating with David Britton for Savoy in the 1990s. The Modernist techniques of collage (as in the work of Picasso and others) and quotation (as in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land) became themes in themselves as the series developed, so it seemed natural to imitate the styles of various artists as we went along. Pastiche is also a chance to flagrantly show off, of course, and I can’t deny that this was also one of my impulses here.

Issue #3 of Reverbstorm had marauding apes as its theme, from the Rue Morgue to Tarzan and King Kong, so I had the idea of doing an ape cover in the style of the celebrated paintings by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593) which make human heads out of fruit, flowers or animals. Easy enough to have the idea but making it work took a lot of effort and required careful sketching beforehand, something I rarely do. The painting was gouache on board, a medium I’d been using for years and this was about the last gouache work I did before switching to acrylics.

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