A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Male objects of desire
Marco Blaze.
Who knew there were hot guys in the Black Lodge? Not another calendar of mine (I don’t know anyone this attractive) but a new calendar from Ross Brownsdon and Travis de Jonk at Bad Behaviour Publishing who notified me about this yesterday. See François Sagat as a drawing, Chi Chi LaRue as herself, and much more here (but only if you’re not alarmed by penises). The calendar is on sale here.
Previously on { feuilleton}
• Bad Behaviour
One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack (2004) by Wangechi Mutu.
I wouldn’t be so bold as to call Benjamin Noys’ contribution to the recent The Weird conference at the University of London a highlight, but it was a surprise to find Lord Horror in general and the Reverbstorm book in particular being discussed alongside so many noteworthy offerings. Noys’ piece, Full Spectrum Offence: Savoy’s Neo-Weird, is now available to read online, a very perceptive examination of the tensions between the Old Weird and the New.
• Le Transperceneige is a multi-volume bande dessinée of post-apocalypse science fiction by Jacques Lob & Jean-Marc Rochette. Snowpiercer is a film adaptation by Korean director Bong Joon-ho featuring John Hurt, Jamie Bell, Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton. Anne Billson calls the director’s cut an “eccentric masterpiece” so it’s dismaying to learn that the film is in danger of being hacked about by the usual rabble of unsympathetic Hollywood distributors.
• This month marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Public Domain Review posted some of the paintings mentioned in Swann’s Way (or The Way by Swann’s as the latest translation so inelegantly has it).
• How the Paris World’s Fair brought Art Nouveau to the Masses in 1900: a huge picture post about my favourite exposition.
• Mix of the week: “Sport of Kings” Mix by Ricardo Donoso. Related: Paul Purgas on five favourite records.
• Ernst Reichl: the man who designed Ulysses. Related: Hear all of Finnegans Wake read aloud over 35 hours.
• “Why does Alain de Botton want us to kill our young?” A splendid rant by Sam Kriss.
• Love’s Secret Ascension: Peter Bebergal on Coil, Coltrane & the 70th birthday of LSD.
• Malicious Damage: Ilsa Colsell on the secret art of Joe Orton & Kenneth Halliwell.
• Just Say No to the Bad Sex Award, or the BS Award as Tom Pollock calls it.
• Lauren O’Neal’s ongoing PJ Harvey Tuesdays: One, Two, Three and Four.
• Neville Brody on the changing face of graphic design.
• A Brief History of the London Necropolis Railway.
• Des Hommes et des Chatons: a Tumblr.
• At Pinterest: Androgyny
• Virgin Prunes: Pagan Lovesong (vibeakimbo) (1982) | Caucasian Walk (1982) | Walls Of Jericho (live at The Haçienda, Manchester, 1983; I’m in that audience somewhere)
Not had anything for a while deserving of the eye candy tag so here’s some gratuitous shots from a short promo video for some underwear company or other (he said disingenuously). The ad is directed by Steven Klein, and the piece as a whole doesn’t appear to have had a straight viewer in mind given the amount of shots that look like AMG beefcake or extra auditions for Fassbinder’s Querelle. And speaking of Rainer’s matelots, they’ve been in mind recently following news that the director’s Genet fantasia will be making a welcome appearance on Blu-ray later this month. The DVD format didn’t do much for those saturated colours so this is good to hear. (Underwear tip via Homotography.)
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hello, sailor
• Querelle again
• Sailors
• Mikel Marton
• Exterface
Daedalus and Icarus (1615–1625) by Anthony van Dyck.
The story of the doomed youth as seen via the few Icarus works at the Google Art Project. Brueghel’s famous painting is absent, unfortunately, so I won’t quote the equally famous lines by Auden either. Van Dyck gives us a golden-haired twink that Auden might approve of although I seem to recall the poet preferred rougher trade. No indication as to how those wings are supposed to function when they don’t seem to be attached to anything. The father points ominously skyward while the boy already knows where he’s headed.
Icarus (1655) by Artus Quellinus.
Artus Quellinus was a Flemish sculptor whose work is a deliberate harking back to Classical antecedents.
The Lament for Icarus (1898) by Herbert Draper.
Herbert Draper has been dismissed for years as a late-Victorian kitsch-monger, far too academic to be worthy of consideration. Since I often feel an affection for anything that upsets art critics I rather like his brand of fin-de-siècle soft porn. Many artists of the period at least varied their output often enough to avoid accusations of unseemly interests. Not so Draper, whose oeuvre runs the gamut of wet mythological females: naiads, sirens, kelpies, mermaids, etc. Even with dead Icarus as a subject he has to throw in a naiad or three. Van Dyck’s twink has transmuted here into a muscular hunk; he’d need to be strong to wield those colossal wings. Interesting to see from the study below that the figure was developed considerably from the original model. The study is also a better piece of draughtsmanship than the painting where the right arm seems wrong somehow, and the legs appear to be melting down the rock on which he’s beached. Barry Windsor Smith produced a variation on the theme in the 1980s that may have been inspired by the Draper, something he called Self-Portrait with Wings.
Study for Icarus (1898) by Herbert Draper.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The end of Orpheus
Against the Glass.
British artist Michael Leonard received a passing mention here some time ago for his work as an illustrator in the 1970s. Since that time he’s concentrated on establishing himself as a portraitist of considerable repute, with a painting of the Queen and Spark the Corgi hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. These fantastic pencil drawings show a more homoerotic side of his work, part of a large series of nude (or near-nude) studies in which beautiful men (and also a number of women) are perfectly rendered. I’ve always liked pure pencil drawing, the challenges of doing it to this standard are considerable, as are the pleasures of seeing such a successful application of the simplest of media. The compositions work really well, tight and often cropped to concentrate the attention. Leonard applies a similar approach in his paintings, some of which replicate or echo the pencil works. I prefer the pencils but then I have a predilection for monochome art. You can judge his paintings for yourself here.
Twisting Torsos.
On the Steps.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive