A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
My thanks once again to DR Tenge for notifying me of a new post of drawings by French artist Gilles Rimbault. More marvellous work that this time tends to the metamorphic rather than the erotic. No details as to date or provenance but considering how little there is of Rimbault’s work online it’s good to see anything new at all.
Scanning some of my work today I thought I’d follow yesterday’s post with a few scans of the colour plates in the second Eric Losfeld volume of Bertrand’s work, Dessins Erotiques II (1971). None of the pictures in the book are titled, and there’s little detail either about their production. Among the colour works is the Boschian piece above which for once doesn’t have one of the artist’s strange women as its sole subject. A few more scans from the same book can be seen at this earlier post.
Work by the elusive French artist Raymond Bertrand has appeared here before although the art continues to be more visible (if obscure) than the man himself. Bertrand’s most famous drawings are the naked women that appeared on the cover of issue 28 of Oz magazine, the notorious School Kids Issue, but I don’t think he was credited for the usage and his name is never mentioned when the magazine is discussed. Looking for information about the Chute Libre books at French SF site Noosfere led me to an entry for Bertrand’s work. The list doesn’t include any of the book collections of his drawings but does have these magazine covers which feature some pieces I hadn’t seen before.
Fiction was the leading French SF magazine, and sported a fascinating range of cover art especially from the mid-60s on. Artists at that time included Philippe Druillet and Philippe Caza, both of whom would become big names in the comics world a few years later. Galaxie was the French edition of American magazine Galaxy, and featured unique material among its translations of Anglophone works. Being French, there’s a greater amount of flesh on display than you’d find on magazine covers in the US and UK; some of this is as salacious as anything else from the period although at least one of the artists drawing naked females was a woman, Sophie Busson. Naked females emerging from—or being absorbed by—strange vegetation, polyps or aquatic organisms were Bertrand’s métier so that’s mostly what one finds here. Few of the covers seem to relate to the magazine’s contents, the artists appear to have been free to draw what they liked; in the case of Druillet that means his usual Lovecraftian architecture. An exception is issue 198 of Fiction which has an article about Bertrand’s work by Jacques Chambon: Raymond Bertrand ou de l’amour de l’art à l’art de l’amour. I’m hoping now that someone might be good enough to translate that piece for us lazy Anglophones.
And speaking of former Oz artists, Renaud Leon left a message recently with news that YouTube now has a channel featuring many examples of Jim Leon’s remarkable paintings.
Continue reading “Raymond Bertrand’s science fiction covers”
I posted a few examples of work by French artist Gilles Rimbault last year, and was hoping at the time that further drawings might come to light. We have D.R. Tenge to thank for posting these and other scans from Plexus magazine on the same LJ page where I found some of the earlier works, together with text that accompanied the pictures. “He pursues an endless search in the ‘erotisme fantastique'” Plexus tells us, and that’s a great description of this curious sub-genre which I’ve previously referred to (following Philip José Farmer) as “the pornography of the weird”. From what I know about Plexus it specialised in this typically late 60s/early 70s blend of science fiction, fantasy and erotic exploration, being a spin-off from Pauwels & Bergier’s magazine of “fantastic realism”, Planète; it also wasn’t the only magazine doing so which makes me wish that Taschen (or somebody) would delve into this sorely neglected area.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Ran Akiyoshi, 1922–1982
• The art of Gilles Rimbault
• The art of Jim Leon, 1938–2002
• The art of Sibylle Ruppert
• The art of Bertrand
In a similar vein to the work of Gilles Rimbault and other erotic fantasists is Ran Akiyoshi, a Japanese artist and illustrator. Akiyoshi’s work manages to be even more obscure than the Europeans, being virtually undocumented outside Japanese websites, hence the absence of titles and dates for these examples. This is surprising given the quasi-Surrealist nature of his paintings which place buxom goddess types in phantasmagoric settings with subtle or not-so-subtle erotic qualities. Akiyoshi follows the pattern of much of this kind of personal fantasy whereby most of the women share similar features. The book cover immediately below is from a recent Japan-only collection of his work. The Illusion cover at the end is another book collection some of whose fascinating pages can be seen here. As always, if anyone turns up a gallery of further pictures, please leave a comment.
