A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Out again to see world-class drummer Chris Corsano play another stunning improv set. This is his last appearance in Manchester, unfortunately, prior to relocating to Edinburgh. Impossible to describe the full range of Corsano’s performance (although I made an attempt earlier). Suffice to say you really ought to try and see this guy play live if you get the chance.
Finally, us poor CD designers are being treated with a bit more respect in the digital music world. Lots of improvements in the new iTunes (is it my imagination or is the sound processing better in this version?) but best of all is the splendid Cover Flow feature which allows you to select music by flipping through the album covers.
Very smart indeed although the graphics processing required is making my old G4 groan a bit. You also need to have artwork attached to all your ripped albums otherwise you’ll be looking at a lot of black squares with quavers on them. iTunes can get the missing artwork for you but only from the iTunes Store which rather limits the field; the more eclectic your taste, the more you’ll have to search for the covers yourself.
Another very welcome new feature: you can finally hear continuous tracks without gaps or clicks, something I’d complained about since v.1. It remains to be seen whether bands and record companies (and Apple, of course) are going to work out a way of giving us the rest of the album artwork but for now this is keeping me happy.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Neville Brody and Fetish Records
• The lost art of sleeve design
top: The Highbury Working, The Lucid View.
bottom: Manchester District Music Archive design, The Major Arcana.
As mentioned last month, I’ve updated and expanded all my CafePress shops which means you can now (should you wish) buy T-shirts, posters, mousepads and other goods from selected artwork. Look for links on the relevant artwork pages. In addition, I’ve added four new shops featuring the pieces shown above; some of the Major Arcana designs are also available individually.
Lastly, CafePress have expanded their range of calendars to include vertical format which means I’ve been able to make three different calendars this year. Calendars proved popular when I did one a couple of years ago but the horizontal format wasn’t very amenable to most of my artwork.
There’ll be more CafePress updates later this month, if time allows.
‘He created his own universe and became its star’
Director David Cronenberg explains the debt he owes to Andy Warhol’s bizarre and chillingly prophetic work
David Cronenberg
Monday September 11, 2006
The Guardian
EMPIRE IS THE CLASSIC. It was outrageous—yet somehow it worked. An eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building, it was high concept, not in the Hollywood sense, but the art sense. It’s got potency, resonance. Andy even said the Empire State Building was a star. It’s so New York, which was the centre of the artistic universe at the time, the 1960s. That’s why I decided to begin the Andy Warhol show I am curating with Empire.
I can’t recall when I first saw a Warhol. I feel as though he was always in my consciousness. I started making films at the same time he did, and the New York underground scene is what influenced me—and that was Andy. He didn’t think you needed access to anything to do what he was doing—just grab a camera, do your own thing, and it’ll work.
Preparing this exhibition, I was initially planning to ignore the films. It seemed too obvious to bring a film-maker in and for him to choose the films. But I didn’t have to dig deep to realise it would be a major oversight. Andy started the silk screens, the film-making and the Death and Disaster series at the same time. Everything influenced everything.
The Deluge (1840).
In the days before cinema and the likes of Roland Emmerich, people had to visit galleries or see touring exhibitions of huge paintings for their fill of artistic cataclysm. I discovered some of these works on my first visit to the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain), aged 13. I was there to see favourite pictures by the Pop artists and Surrealists and so was completely unprepared for the room of three John Martin paintings and the awesome (and enormous) The Deluge by Francis Danby (1793–1861). These were pictures that never appeared in conventional art histories although subsequent scouring of libaries revealed at least one book devoted to Martin’s scenes of Biblical destruction. Danby, on the other hand, remained obscure, and for years this single painting was the only work of his that I’d seen.
Over the years I’ve come to prefer The Deluge to many of Martin’s paintings. His figures are larger and the draughtsmanship is better, the composition is more developed and the technical qualities (despite complaints in the article below) are superb. Like many painters of this period, Danby had great skill at rendering the translucence of water and the gorgeous texture of the waves in this painting was one of the first things to strike me (something that’s impossible see in books or online reproduction). Closer examination reveals detail of a kind that Martin usually buries or ignores, from the tiny ark sailing away on the horizon, to the lion clutching desperately at a branch to escape the water. Most curious of all, in the far right the painter has stranded a pair of anomalous Biblical figures, a glowing angel and what appears to be a drowned giant. The Deluge is probably Danby’s most accomplished work so it’s good to know it remains on public display.
The following article is seventeen years old and remains the only newspaper or magazine feature I’ve seen about Danby’s work to date.
An Attempt to illustrate the Opening of the Sixth Seal (1828).
Darkness Visible
Many of the sombre, apocalyptic works by the nineteenth-century painter Francis Danby have become darker still as the paint and varnish have deteriorated over the years. But now some have been successfully restored for a retrospective of his work.
Andrew Graham-Dixon
Saturday, February 11th 1989
The Independent
FRANCIS DANBY’S The Upas, or Poison Tree in the Island of Java, the smash sensation of the annual British Institution exhibition of 1820 and one of the most ambitious narrative paintings of its time, has languished in the obscurity of the V&A’s basement for more than a century. Recently restored, it is the focal point of the Danby retrospective that has been mounted jointly by the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery and the Tate Gallery. The Upas Tree marked Francis Danby’s London debut, and in some style. Measuring 66in by 99in, Danby’s gloomy canvas was an enormous calling-card, his way of announcing that here, from provincial Bristol (via Ireland, his place of birth), was a young painter to be reckoned with.