A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Fantasy
Limbroglio (URBS V).
Drypoint prints by a French artist who also has a nice line in moody renderings of European cities—Paris, Venice, Rome—which occasionally stray into architectural speculation. Outright fantasia is more evident in these mysterious views more of which may be seen at the Velly gallery.
Les grandes Manoeuvres.
Paysage aux mollusques.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
The Blue Girl (2013) by Sungwon.
• “Meanwhile, in her parents’ room [Max] Ernst painted aardvarks eating ants and big human hands around the windows. ‘Sexual connotations, I think,’ she says shyly.” Agnès Poirier talks to Cécile Eluard about her childhood among the Surrealists.
• “Thrilling and prophetic”: why film-maker Chris Marker‘s radical images influenced so many artists. Sukhdev Sandhu, William Gibson, Mark Romanek and Joanna Hogg on the elusive director.
• At Dangerous Minds: Throbbing Gristle live in Manchester in 1980, and Brian Butler talks about the rediscovered early print of Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising. There’s a trailer!
• From 1981: The Art of Fiction No. 69 at The Paris Review, an interview with Gabriel García Márquez. Related: Thomas Pynchon reviewed Love in the Time of Cholera in 1988.
• “Seven years ago, a stolen first edition of Borges’s early poems was returned to Argentina’s National Library. But was it the right copy?” Graciela Mochkofsky investigates.
• “What was Walter Benjamin doing with his shirt off in Ibiza?” Peter E. Gordon reviews Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life by Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings.
• A video by Marcel Weber for Måtinden, a track from Eric Holm’s Andøya album. Another album on the Subtext label that I helped design.
• More Ian Miller: Boing Boing has pages from his new book, The Art of Ian Miller, and there’s an interview at Sci-Fi-O-Rama.
• Outrun Europa, a free compilation of 80s-style electronic music. There’s a lot more along those lines here.
• Praise Be! Favourite religious and spiritual records chose by writers at The Quietus.
• Ralph Steadman illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1973.
• British Pathé is uploading 85,000 of its newsreel films to YouTube.
• Drawings by Lebbeus Woods at The Drawing Center, New York.
• At Pinterest: Ian Miller and Kenneth Anger.
• Lucifer Sam (1967) by Pink Floyd | The Surrealist Waltz (1967) by Pearls Before Swine | Which Dreamed It (1968) by Boeing Duveen And The Beautiful Soup
More new work of mine has been unveiled in the past few days so I can show these here. The Buried Life and Cities and Thrones are a pair of fantasy novels by new author Carrie Patel being published by Angry Robot. I was asked to provide something in an engraved style set against a black background, with imagery that reflected themes of vast, underground architecture and armed conflict.
Vast architecture of any description is something I’ve always enjoyed, the main challenge with each book came in trying to imply the architecture and events without the pictorial content becoming incoherent. Marc at Angry Robot asked for something Piranesian where the architecture was concerned. Looking over Piranesi’s non-Carceri designs didn’t turn up anything with a suitably dramatic perspective, however, so most of what you see in the first cover comes from Giuseppe Galli Bibiena’s Architetture e Prospettive (1740). The Bibienas were a family of architects and theatrical engineers who specialised in dizzying perspective views for their stage designs; Bibiena’s book was produced to preserve some of his more celebrated designs, the originals of which are now lost. I’ve had a book of these drawings for years but this is the first opportunity I’ve had to make use of them in any kind of collage.
This style of Baroque architecture doesn’t suit steampunk imagery which tends towards 19th-century urban/industrial; the plates are also rather staid scenes without the graphic flare that Piranesi gave to everything he rendered, real or imagined. But I do like those plunging perspectives, and pieces from two of the plates turned out to share both the same perspective and the same lighting direction. It’s easy to collage things into a flat view but creating a realistic sense of depth from bits and pieces can be tricky.
The frame for the second cover has more of a Piranesian quality being chipped and eroded. The typography for the titles went through several changes, the versions here show a late suggestion of mine with lettering that’s probably too thin to read well at a distance (or a small size on a web page). SF Signal has a post showing the Angry Robot versions which will probably be the final ones, together with a preview of the first book.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Aldous Huxley on Piranesi’s Prisons
Fritz Hegenbart was an Austrian artist some of whose work has appeared here before in posts about Jugend magazine. Hegenbart provided many illustrations and embellishments for Jugend and other journals circa 1900, the examples here being mostly from a feature in the collected Kunst und Handwerk for 1902/03, a magazine I was rifling through last week. Once you’ve been through Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration and others you find the same contents repeating themselves with slight variations; that’s no surprise when there was only a certain amount of news that any arts magazine could report for a given year.
Hegenbart’s work stands out for conjuring the slightly grotesque allegories I often like to see: The woman aiming an arrow from inside a serpent’s jaws represents Malice, while the woman being dragged under the water by a tentacled monstrosity is Art falling prey to Mammon. An updated version of that picture would have to show Mammon as a bloated and triumphant abomination. Hegenbart seemed to enjoy attaching wings to whatever women he was drawing; further down the page you’ll find a wingless woman being menaced by a particularly dopey-looking dragon.
There’s also the curious ink piece below showing the location of the artist’s home in Dachau, Bavaria, and what to our eyes is a supremely inappropriate skull-shaped container for his brushes. The shadow of two world wars always hangs heavily over these magazines (especially in the nationalistic Jugend) but the imagery is seldom as prescient as this.
King’s Cloak (2012) by Alice Lin.
• The week in Finnegans Wake: illustrations by John Vernon Lord for a new Folio Society edition; The Guardian‘s review from 1939; Christina Scholz explores Joyce’s use of the Ant and the Grasshopper fable; Sheng Yun wonders when Dai Congrong will compete the first Chinese translation of the book; Stephanie Boland on riverrun, the latest theatrical adaptation.
• It’s Robert Aickman‘s centenary year so Faber are reissuing several volumes of his peerless “strange stories”. And it’s good to see the great Clark Ashton Smith finally receive the blessing of Penguin Classics.
• The Teenage Boyfriend of the Beat Generation: Marcus Ewart slept with Allen Ginsberg (who showed him how to give a proper blowjob), and had an eight-year relationship with William Burroughs.
Yet another advocate of shorter work time was JS Mill. He dismissed the ‘gospel of work’ proposed by Thomas Carlyle in part because it drew a veil over the real costs of work, including slave work that Carlyle sought to defend. Instead, Mill advocated a ‘gospel of leisure’, arguing that technology should be used to curtail work time as far as possible. This stress on technology as a means to shorten work time was later to feature in Bertrand Russell’s 1932 essay, ‘In Praise of Idleness’.
David Spencer on The Case for Working Less
• More Steve Moore memorials: Mitch Jenkins put the pages from Unearthing online, while Pádraig Ó Méalóid posted a personal appreciation at The Beat.
• Linda Marsa on how psychedelics are helping cancer patients deal with their illness.
• The Weird Album: art by Enrique Alcatena (including some Lovecraftian pieces).
• Didgeridoom: Director Ted Kotcheff talks to Robert Barry about Wake in Fright.
• The Jealous God (1985), a comic strip by Alejandro Jodorowsky & Silvio Cadelo.
• The Dune in Your Head: Ethan Gilsdorf on the greatest SF film never made.
• 50 minutes of Kraftwerk on Rockpalast in 1970. Astonishing.
• At 50 Watts: Sheet-music covers from Sweden in the 1920s.
• Harvard discovers old library books bound in human skin.
• Same-sex marriage is now legal in England and Wales.
• Wyrd Daze has reached issue 5.
• Kaleidoscopes at Pinterest.
• Flight From Ashiya (live on TV! 1967?) by Kaleidoscope (UK) | Lie To Me (1969) by Kaleidoscope (US) | Kaleidoscope (1984) by The Rain Parade