A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Fantasy
Hajime Emoto creates very convincing imaginary creatures, all with a slightly desiccated appearance, that range from the strikingly demonic (like the example above) to more mundane fish, amphibians and plant life. Site is Japanese-only but that don’t let that prevent you from browsing.
Via The Nonist.
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No, not the dreadful singer from The Monkees but he of the undersea locker and also the new villain in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Bill Nighy plays this splendidly-designed character, with the assistance of some CGI to get those tentacles working. I’ve still not seen the first film but the look of this makes me more interested in the series as a whole.
Aside from William Hope Hodgson‘s sea tales, the pirates plus voodoo/Sargasso Sea angle has rarely been exploited properly in fiction. Tim Powers had a go in On Stranger Tides but the results fell rather flat. In film there’s been hardly anything apart from the Hammer oddity The Lost Continent (1968), based on Uncharted Seas, a Dennis Wheatley potboiler that plundered Hodgson’s Sargasso Sea stories. The new Pirates film may be about to amend this situation; Davy Jones looks like something dreamed up after a heavy diet of Hodgson and HP Lovecraft.
Ernst Fuchs, one of the founders of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism in 1946, and a big influence on a later generation of artists such as HR Giger and Robert Venosa.
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L’abattoir.
From ‘Visionary Art in France’, The Visionary Review, Fall 2004:
Poumeyrol shares with Margotton a fascination for the interior landscape, where dimly illuminated grottos resonate with the remains of past epochs. And yet, his barren and abandoned spaces are often redolent with signs of the artists’ own lost memories.
In his early works, Jean-Marie Poumeyrol was recognized as a master of erotica, combining hallucinogenic and macabre imagery in an unparalleled manner. But, in his maturity, the artist has displayed a marked fascination for landscapes, particularly the enclosed spaces of sewers, industrial waste and disposal plants. Yet, the amazing accuracy and finesse of rendering which enlivened his early works has not left him and, if anything, only increased with age.
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