Peter Eudenbach’s Eiffel Ferris wheel

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Tours de Revolutions by Peter Eudenbach (2007).

Built to commemorate the French Revolution, the Eiffel Tower inspired Ferris to create a revolving wrought iron marvel to surpass it. Twenty years later Duchamp’s love of Ferris Wheels led to the first readymade and caused a revolution in art. Tours de Revolution is a Ferris wheel made of Eiffel towers, bringing this famous landmark full circle.

And speaking of Gustave Eiffel’s monument, Google Maps now has very clear views of central Paris. That snaking line of people is the queue to use one of the lifts.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
City of Light
Paris V: Details
Enormous structures II: Tatlin’s Tower

Howard Pyle’s pirates

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The Buccaneer was a Picturesque Fellow by Howard Pyle (1905).

Seeing as how Johnny Depp and co. are sailing the Spanish Main once more (to mixed reviews, unfortunately), now is perhaps a suitable moment to note the genesis of our popular conception of buccaneers. The famous characters of the Wild West were being mythologised while many of them were still alive and some survived long enough to be consulted by filmmakers such as John Ford when the first of the silent Westerns were being made. Pirates had their exploits recounted in tabloid fashion via books like The Newgate Calendar but our romantic image of the pirate comes primarily from Robert Louis Stevenson and artist/writer Howard Pyle (1853–1911).

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Keith Richards by Paul Karslake (1998).

Pyle’s articles for Harper’s Monthly Magazine in the early 1900s were later collected as the very popular Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates, “Fiction, Fact & Fancy concerning the Buccaneers & Marooners of the Spanish Main”. The considerable gulf between fact and fiction can be see in early pirate portraits, most of which are crude woodcut renderings. Pyle ignored these for the most part, relying on imagination to exaggerate details of worn-out 18th century clothing in much the same way that Sergio Leone and others exaggerated certain qualities of 19th century garb for their Westerns, turning what would have been a rather sorry reality into something more visually thrilling. Hollywood costume designers have used Pyle’s paintings as source material for pirate characters ever since so it’s perhaps fitting that Johnny Depp’s conception of Jack Sparrow’s character also came from a painting, Paul Karslake’s portrait of Keith Richards posing as a pirate. And now Richards is in the latest film playing Sparrow’s father…

Howard Pyle at 100 Years of Illustration
A Pyle pirate gallery

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The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Coming soon: Sea Monsters and Cannibals!
Seamen in great distress eat one another
Druillet meets Hodgson
Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys
Davy Jones

Imaginary maps by Francesca Berrini

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Us and Them (Torn Map Collage on Canvas).

At first glance, from afar, Berrini’s works look like a collection of high-quality maps and atlases with unfamiliar continents and geographic markings. As you examine the details of the maps a bit closer, and try to follow the geographic and geopolitical information displayed, you do a double-take as you realize that the maps themselves are actually constructed from minuscule pieces of other maps, forming new terrain, new geographies, and new names of places in entirely new languages. Berrini maintains the abstract language of maps, yet plays with our notions of their unspoken authority and overall usability.

By recycling different visions of the world, past and present, Berrini hopes to capture her nostalgia for the places that she has not been to. “The creation of maps has historically been a painstaking process, meticulously striving for accuracy. I aim to slowly create a separate world from the scraps of my current fascinations. I am reforming the world that is available to me piece by piece to reflect my imagination of what I do not know. A pointless precision beautifully mirroring nothing.”—Francesca Berrini

Via Design Observer.

Unusual Cards by Francesca Berrini

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The fantastic art archive

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The Voynich Manuscript
The Codex Seraphinianus
20 Sites n Years by Tom Phillips
The Atlas Coelestis of Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr

The art of Jacques Sultana

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Dies Irae.

Jacques Sultana is a French artist whose paintings of naked men are very well-realised—photo-realist almost—but like a lot of gay art don’t do much apart from say “here’s a naked man.” However, his site also has a small gallery of homoerotic fantasy drawings which are equally well-done and far more detailed and imaginative than one usually sees from gay artists. Some of these pictures remind me of Patrick Woodroffe’s highly-detailed and florid fantasy paintings.

Update: the site is still active but these particular drawings seem to have been removed.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The gay artists archive
The fantastic art archive