MC Escher – Page 7 – { feuilleton }

Three today

Three Spheres II (1946) by MC Escher.

Celebrating the third { feuilleton } anniversary and post number 1,438. It’s become customary now to list the most popular posts of the past year so here we go again:

• The Underwater Sculpture Gallery. This has been surprisingly popular for several months now, despite pictures of the artworks in question having been featured on very popular sites such as Boing Boing. Typing “underwater” into Google’s image search provides the answer, revealing that one of the pictures from the post is on the first results page.

• The gay artists archive. This section has also leapt in popularity after the page was linked recently on StumbleUpon. It’s not a definitive archive by any means, plenty of other sites are attempting that already. These archive pages are only a convenience so that people following some of the lengthier visual categories can see at a glance what else is there. At its best this section may introduce people to more recent work which the historical sites omit.

• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer. No surprise that this is still popular two years on.

• Bare blade. Part of the new semi-serious Men with swords obsession. I think people like this guy’s bum more than anything. Can you blame them?

• Two guys kissing. Yes, Googlers, when you search for “Two guys kissing” you get this wonderfully sexy photo by Jack Slomovits. He’s great, buy his book.

Thanks for reading!

John x

Gods’ Man by Lynd Ward

I’ve never tried woodcut engaving—the closest was scraperboard and some linocuts when I was a teenager—but I’ve always admired the form and Lynd Ward (1905–1985) was one of its masters. Ward’s wordless “novels” were inspired by the similar work of Frans Masereel and you can see pages from two of these, Gods’ Man (1930) and Madman’s Drum (1930) at The Visual Telling of Stories. Ward’s work is frequently referred to as an inspiration by later illustrators, and comic artists especially have responded to these pictorial narratives. Woodcut illustration had a resurgence of popularity before and after the Second World War; most of MC Escher‘s early work is woodcut engraving, for instance. There are still a few contemporary practitioners, Clifford Harper being one of the most visible in the UK.

• Bud Plant’s Lynd Ward page
• A Lynd Ward site with examples from other books

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive
• The illustrators archive

Austin Osman Spare

Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of one of my favourite artists, Austin Osman Spare.

Like many people in the 1970s, I was introduced to the work of Austin Spare by Man, Myth and Magic, a seven volume “illustrated encyclopedia of the supernatural” published weekly in 120 112 parts by Purnell. My mother was a Dennis Wheatley reader so we had a couple of occult paperbacks in the house, among them one of William Seabrook‘s accounts of voodoo in Haiti and a copy of Richard Cavendish’s wonderful magical primer, The Black Arts, (later retitled The Magical Arts). Cavendish had been chosen as editor of Man, Myth and Magic and included occultist and writer Kenneth Grant on his editorial staff, a decision that gave the book’s producers access to Grant’s collection of Spare pictures. In a rather bold move, they launched Man, Myth and Magic in 1970 with a detail of a Spare drawing on the cover, a work often referred to as The Elemental although the authoritative Spare collection, Zos Speaks has it titled as The Vampires are Coming. It’s a shame that AOS didn’t live for a few more years to see this; after labouring in poverty and obscurity for most of his life he would have found his work flooding Britain, with this first issue on sale all over the country and the cover picture being pasted on billboards and sold as posters. It’s possible there were even television adverts for the book (although I don’t recall any), since there usually were for expensive part works like this.

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