HR Giger – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Thomas Bodkin on Harry Clarke

Harry Clarke’s work appeared in the pages of The Studio magazine on several occasions, either in review or as here, a subject of a special feature. I linked to a later piece a few years ago but until this week I hadn’t seen this earlier entry from November 1919. (I keep intending to download all the issues at the University of Heidelberg and go through them properly. One day…)

Thomas Bodkin was a barrister and director of Ireland’s National Gallery who became a great champion of Harry Clarke’s work. Like many of the artist’s Irish enthusiasts, Bodkin was familiar with Clarke’s stained-glass designs which he highlights here. Clarke’s stained-glass art is as important a part of his career as his illustration—it was the family business, for which he created over 160 windows and panel designs—but the fruits of this work were seldom seen in print. The Studio was in the vanguard of print reproduction at the time, especially where colour was concerned, so the reproductions of the glass designs are especially good, much better than some of the colour plates in Clarke’s illustrated books. The ever-popular illustration for Poe’s Morella also benefits from reproduction on a large page where the minuscule faces hiding in the decoration become more apparent.

A few pages before the Clarke feature there are two works by John Hancock that I hadn’t seen before. Hancock and Clarke were both featured in The Golden Hind, the arts magazine edited by Clifford Bax and Austin Spare, but Hancock lapsed into almost total obscurity following his death at the age of 22. For years all I knew of either him or his work was a book reproduction of the Golden Hind piece together with a note saying that he was dismayed by his declining health, and that his body was found floating in Regent’s Canal. (See this page for more.) Harry Clarke also suffered from poor health for much of his life, and died at the age of 41 in Chur, Switzerland, a town best known today for being the birthplace of HR Giger. Some of the phallic monstrosities lurking at the margins of Clarke’s Faust drawings might be precursors of Giger’s airbrushed abominations. I wonder if Giger knew of this connection? Answers on a biomechanical postcard.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Harry Clarke: His Graphic Art
• Harry Clarke and others in The Studio
• Harry Clarke’s Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
• Harry Clarke in colour
• The Tinderbox
• Harry Clarke and the Elixir of Life
• Cardwell Higgins versus Harry Clarke
• Modern book illustrators, 1914
• Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke
• Strangest Genius: The Stained Glass of Harry Clarke
• Harry Clarke’s stained glass
• Harry Clarke’s The Year’s at the Spring
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

Ron Cobb, 1937–2020

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1959.

The death of American illustrator/cartoonist/designer Ron Cobb was announced yesterday. All the obituaries are concentrating on the designs he produced for Hollywood feature films so here’s an alternative view of a long and varied career.

After Bathing At Baxter’s (1967) by Jefferson Airplane.

Cobb’s first album cover is his most famous, and probably his most familiar work outside his film designs, but there were a few more, some of which may be seen below. The San-Francisco-house-as-aircraft always reminds me of the car/plane hybrid piloted by Professor Pat Pending in the Wacky Races cartoons.

Some Of Our Best Friends Are (1968) by Various Artists.

Ecology symbol, October 1969.

Cobb’s copyright-free design for an ecology symbol was published in the Los Angeles Free Press in November, 1969. The “Freep” also ran Cobb’s cartoons, some of which were later collected in The Cobb Book (1975). Satire has a tendency to date very quickly but many of Cobb’s barbs are still relevant today.

Undated cartoon.

Doctor Druid’s Haunted Seance (1973).

Continue reading “Ron Cobb, 1937–2020”

HR Giger’s Passagen

HR Giger’s art books were always very thorough in detailing all the media manifestations of the artist’s work, including film and television appearances. For years this presented tantalising questions, especially regarding the lengthy pre-Alien documentaries that were listed there: what were these films, and when would we get to see them? Giger’s Necronomicon (1976) did finally appear on YouTube a few years ago, and now here’s the second of the pair thanks to an upload of what appears to be a Japanese laserdisc.

Passagen was made in 1972 by Giger’s friend Fredi M. Murer, their third film collaboration after Heimkiller and High (1967) and Swiss Made 2069 (1968). The latter (which Giger co-directed) is still frustratingly absent from the web, and similarly tantalising for being a 45-minute piece of underground science fiction which features Giger’s first production designs for cinema. Passagen was less ambitious, a 50-minute documentary about Giger’s work made for the German TV station, WDR. As a documentary it functions as a companion to Giger’s Necronomicon, while both films complement the subsequent art books, especially Giger’s Necronomicon (the book) which features many of the paintings seen in the films, together with anecdotes about their origins and inspiration. One of these anecdotes, about the nightmares induced in the young Hans Rudi by a stairway in the hotel next door to the Giger family home, is recounted in Passagen alongside the vertiginous drawings the nightmares inspired. It’s impossible to consider this piece of child psychology, and to watch the artist walking up and down stairs and stepladders, without recalling that Giger died after falling down a flight of stairs in 2014.

Giger’s Necronomicon is the more interesting of the two documentaries, especially now that the life and work is so well known; the art is taken more for granted, and we also get to see Giger at work on one of his big airbrush paintings. Passagen spends much of its time attempting to contextualise Giger’s drawings and paintings for an unwitting television audience, so a great deal of the running time is given over to newsreel footage of wars, riots, terrorism, atomic explosions and so on. A geneticist discusses the effects of atomic mutation while Giger’s earliest series of pictures, Atomkinder, is shown; psychoanalysts examine his paintings from a psychosexual angle.

Of more interest for Giger aficionados is the presence of his partner at the time, Li Tobler, the subject of several memorable portraits from this period. Among the working shots, the best shows Giger improvising a drawing with the same speed as Philippe Druillet in the Ô Sidarta film. Giger only started using an airbrush in 1972 so most of the works seen here are either early drawings or the paintings in the Passagen and Alptraum series, the style and colouring of which is much closer to the art world of 1972 than anything which would follow. For me the greatest revelation comes early on when Giger picks out a record to play while he’s working. The disc he chooses is just identifiable as Universal Consciousness by Alice Coltrane, an album which had been released the year before. (This isn’t the music heard on the soundtrack, however.) Alice Coltrane’s brand of ecstatic, pan-religious jazz would seem remote from Giger’s own universe but the choice isn’t so surprising if you know that he’d been a jazz enthusiast since the 1950s; in The Book of Alien (1979) his list of influences includes HP Lovecraft, John Coltrane and Miles Davis.

As is evident from the screen grabs, the film is hard-coded throughout with Japanese subtitles. Unlike Giger’s Necronomicon there’s no English overdub either, the soundtrack is in German throughout. I can’t complain when I’ve been waiting so long to be able to see this at all. For those who watched the later film divided into four YouTube clips there’s now a complete version (also Japanese but with English overdub) here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Heimkiller and High
• The Man Who Paints Monsters In The Night
• Hans by Sibylle
• HR Giger album covers
• Giger’s Necronomicon
• Dan O’Bannon, 1946–2009
• Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune
• The monstrous tome

Weekend links 302

Nymphs of Bacchus by Lozzy Bones.

• “[Jonathan Meades] has a horror of explanation and an even greater one of manifestos, the artless moron’s medium of choice.” The writer turns artist with an “exhibition of Treyfs and Artknacks” at Londonewscastle.

• Robert Aickman: Author of Strange Tales is a 50-minute introduction to the writer and his works by RB Russell and Rosalie Parker.

• A second volume of Cosmic Machine: A Voyage Through French Cosmic & Electronic Avantgarde will be landing in May.

• Amelia Mangan talks to Kattomic Energy about her horror fiction, and mentions these pages in passing. (Thanks!)

• The Interpretation of Screams: AS Hamrah on David Lynch: The Man from Another Place by Dennis Lim.

• “People thought we were on drugs – and we were!” Minimalist musician Tony Conrad interviewed.

• Two 1975 Buchla concerts by Suzanne Ciani are released for the first time by Finders Keepers.

• Inspiration from above and below: The strange world of… Sunn O))).

• At Dangerous Minds: HR Giger’s ads for the Pioneer Corporation.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: New Queer Cinema (1985–1998).

• Graphic Stamps, a history by Iain Follett and Blair Thomson.

• Ramsey Campbell’s “Thirteen Novels on the Edge of Horror”.

• The occult artwork of David Chaim Smith.

• Easter Woman (1980) by The Residents | Easter Parade (1984) by The Blue Nile | Easterfaust (2014) by The Cosmic Dead

The King in Green

Hastur (1999) by John Coulthart.

Going through some of my old Lovecraft art this week it occurred to me that this drawing hadn’t been made public in its original colour form. Hastur appears as a murkier black-and-white illustration in the Great Old Ones series I produced in collaboration with Alan Moore for The Haunter of the Dark. The drawing was one of several improvised pieces made using coloured pencils on tinted paper. Some people may regard this and similar works as “Gigeresque” but I only apply that label to close imitations of HR Giger’s biomechanical style. This type of improvised drawing or painting predates Giger—Max Ernst’s decalcomania paintings being familiar examples—and you see similar fields of organic or mineral forms in the work of other Surrealist or Fantastic artists. If you have some ability with a pencil or paintbrush it’s relatively easy to produce a lot of this kind of work; the challenge is to do something more than create a mass of writhing abstraction.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive