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Peter Haars book covers

Peter Haars (1940–2005) was born in Germany but moved to Norway in the 1960s where he worked as a graphic designer, art director and illustrator. He also wrote fiction and created Prokon (1971), a one-off publication that looks like a designer’s take on underground comics. Most of the covers that turn up when you search for his work are science fiction, and all painted in that bold airbrush style that was common in the 1970s. Documentation is scarce, unfortunately, ISFDB only lists two titles, so I’ve no idea about the dates, but the Lanterne SF imprint was active throughout the decade.

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Paul Delvaux ou les Femmes Défendues

Henri Storck’s short film from 1971 is mostly an overview of Paul Delvaux’s irreducibly mysterious paintings but the first 7 minutes are invaluable for the views they give of the artist at work. I’m always interested in the technical details of painting but these are seldom mentioned in art books which tend to be more concerned with discussions of meaning and artistic intent. So here we see Delvaux sketching, then leafing through a collection of preliminary studies before finally dabbing at a figure on a large canvas in his skull-filled studio.

The rest of the film is taken up with shots that roam over many of the artist’s earlier paintings. I don’t have any books about Delvaux so there are more of his pictures here than I’ve seen in one place, all of them displaying the familiar nocturnal enigmas: somnambulist nudes, trains, moonlight, Classical architecture and so on. The voiceovers, including that of the artist, are in unsubtitled French but the film is available with subtitles as part of a DVD collection of films about Belgian artists and cultural figures directed by Storck and others. One for the shopping list.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Raoul Servais: Courts-Métrages
• The mystery of trams
• Temptations
• Papillons de Nuit, a film by Raoul Servais
• Paul Delvaux: The Sleepwalker of Saint-Idesbald
• Ballard and the painters
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux

Weekend links 571

Habit d’Astrologue (c. 1700) by Gerard Valck.

• “The Appointed Cloud begins with the high-pitched, keening sound of many bagpipes noisily playing at once—and then the music slowly coalesces, approaching a peaceful, tranquil hum. This gives way to fast-paced repetitive pulses, reminiscent of the minimalist works of composers such as Terry Riley and Philip Glass. Then the bagpipes join in once more, in a ferocious swarm of energy.” Geeta Dayal on the music of Yoshi Wada.

• “How can we conceive of the time of climate change, the time of planetary death? The House on the Borderland tried to conceive of exactly this a century ago. Yes, the narrator’s acts are fruitless. He gets haplessly carted about the universe to witness the end of time, which never really ends, is always at the edge, nearing an asymptote, on the borderland.” Namwali Serpell journeys through space and time with William Hope Hodgson.

• The Bureau of Lost Culture: DJ Food hosts a podcast discussion with Tony Bennett, founder and publisher of Knockabout Comics.

• Mixes of the week: Isolated Mix 111 (plus interview) by Ian Boddy, and a Wire mix (plus interview) by Teresa Winter.

• Fantastic visions and unknown worlds: Edwin Pouncey on Van Der Graaf Generator’s sleeve art.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Sculptor Kenichi Nakaya reconfigures ubiquitous Japanese rural crafts.

• My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields: “We wanted to sound like a band killing their songs.”

• At Wormwoodiana: More earth mysteries are explored in Northern Earth magazine.

• New music: Black Horses Of The Sun by Dave Bessell.

• The Exotica Project: One Hundred Dreamland 45s

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Hans Richter Day.

• Mdou Moctar‘s favourite music.

• Earth Floor (1985) by Michael Brook | Earth Tribe (1993) by Transglobal Underground | Earth Lights (2012) by Belbury Poly

Frazetta and Poe

Art by Frank Frazetta, lettering by Gail Smith.

Frank Frazetta wasn’t an artist you’d usually associate with a literary master like Edgar Allan Poe. With the exception of an idiosyncratic Lord of the Rings portfolio most of the books that Frazetta illustrated were by Robert E. Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs. The page above is from a series of drawings in issue 8 of Witzend magazine that accompany the text of Poe’s The City in the Sea. There’s no editorial comment to explain the origin of this piece but Frazetta’s drawings, which depict the sole survivor of a plane crash, look like they may have been intended for something else entirely, there’s no connection with the poem apart from the coastal setting. Witzend was an odd and interesting magazine that was founded by Wallace Wood to accommodate pieces like this one which might not have an outlet elsewhere. Frazetta had a drawing in the first issue in 1966; issue 8 appeared in 1972 by which time the magazine had a different publisher and editor but continued to feature work by Wood and his friends. The whole run is very worthwhile, even issue 9 which departed from the usual form to devote the entire number to the films of WC Fields.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Frank Frazetta, 1928–2010
• Frazetta: Painting with Fire
• Fantastic art from Pan Books

The art of Mike Hinge, 1931–2003

Amazing Science Fiction, May 1972.

Back in March I ended my post on the psychedelia-derived art style that I think of as “the groovy look” with the words “there’s a lot more to be found.” There is indeed, and I’d neglected to include anything in the post by Mike Hinge, a New Zealand-born illustrator whose covers for American SF magazines in the 1970s brought a splash of vivid colour to the groove-deprived world of science fiction. This was a rather belated development for staid titles like Amazing and Analog whose covers in the previous decade wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Gernsback era. Opening the door to someone like Mike Hinge, a graphic designer as well as a general illustrator, was probably a result of both magazines having undergone recent changes of editorship. Hinge approached SF art in the same way that Jim Steranko approached comic-book art in the late 1960s, importing trends that had been flourishing outside the medium. (And Steranko liked Hinge’s art enough to publish a portfolio of black-and-white drawings, The Mike Hinge Experience, in 1973.) This kind of graphic style was increasingly outmoded by the mid-70s but some of Hinge’s compositions are audacious in context: the Algol cover with one of his robots seen in a water reflection (and those ripples that defy perspective), the Analog cover that works both vertically and horizontally.

For this post I’ve favoured Hinge’s groovy look over other covers, especially those from the late 70s when his cover art shifted to a painted style which is less distinctive, and less interesting as a result. It’s the distinctive style that people still prefer today. There’s more to be seen at Tenth Letter of the Alphabet and Onyx Cube.

Undated drawing (probably mid-60s).

Something else you can always find more of is Aubrey Beardsley borrowings. Via Tenth Letter of the Alphabet which has a couple more pieces in this style.

Wraparound cover for Witzend #6, Spring 1969.

Witzend was a magazine of comics, fantasy stories and related art published by Wallace Wood, a complete run of which may be found here.

Amazing Science Fiction, November 1970.

The Leaves of Time (1971).

Continue reading “The art of Mike Hinge, 1931–2003”