A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Three pages of them, and BIG scans as well, which makes a nice change for a web gallery. Strictly speaking, many of these films aren’t what’s usually classed as film noir (a debatable term at the best of times) but we shouldn’t quibble, painted posters are now a lost art.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alida Valli, 1921–2006
Andreas Martens, artist of Rork.
A native of Germany, Andreas (Andreas Martens (1951- ) studied at the St. Luc comics school in Belgium, assisting Eddy Paape on Udolfo, before relocating to France. His genre series include Arq, Cromwell Stone, Cyrrus, Rork and its spin-off, Capricorne, as well as a number of single works such as La Caverne du Souvenir (The Cave of Memory), Coutoo, Dérives (Adrift), Aztèques, and Révélations Posthumes (Posthumous Revelations).
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931
Regular readers may have noticed the coming and going of certain features here recently, due to my experimenting with different plugins. One of the great features of the WordPress blogging software is its open source quality which allows anyone to write a plugin to extend the application. Ones I’ve been playing with over the past week are Justin Watt’s Random Image plugin which is creating the “Previously” “From the archives” images in the sidebar and the Social Bookmarks plugin which adds a “Bookmark this” feature to the end of posts. The latter I’ve disabled for now since it refuses to allow me to choose which bookmark selections are shown (del.icio.us and digg, for example), presenting instead a fruit salad of different gifs that looks messy. I may return this later if I can find a way to get it to work properly—PHP is not my forte—or find another plugin that does the required job.
Scène d’été (Summer Scene, 1869) by Jean-Frédéric Bazille.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Thomas Eakins, 1844–1916
“I watched a silver swan which had a living grace about his movements and a living intelligence in his eyes.” Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad.
The Silver Swan is perhaps the best known and best loved object in The Bowes Museum. It is musical automaton in the form of a life-size model of a swan, comprising a clockwork mechanism covered in silver plumage above a music box. It rests on a stream made of twisted glass rods interspersed with silver fish. When the mechanism is wound up, the glass rods rotate, the music begins, and the swan twists its head to the left and right and appears to preen its back. It then appears to see a fish in the water below and bends down to catch it, it then swallows the fish as the music stops and resumes its upright position. The whole performance lasts about forty seconds. In reality the fish has been concealed lengthways on a pivot in the swan’s beak and returns to this position. In real life swans do not eat fish.
The Bowes Museum site has more details about John Joseph Merlin’s splendid swan and this page has a QT movie of the automaton in action.