{ feuilleton }

Attenborough: Genesis? It can go forth and multiply

The HAL Project.
January flew by in a blizzard of work so posting here tended to rely more on pictures than words. As usual the things I’ve been designing will be unveiled when they’re closer to being published or released but for now here’s some new or not-so-new items worthy of note.
• The HAL Project screensaver. [...]

John Martyn on stage in 1975 with ubiquitous spliff.
Given a choice, I’d probably pick his 1977 opus, One World, as a favourite although everything he did in the 1970s is worth hearing. Great songs and great collaborators, especially bassist Danny Thompson. His use of echo and volume pedal to extend the range of his guitar [...]

Cosmic Zoom (1968) is a short, semi-animated film by Eva Szasz, one of the many great shorts financed by the National Film Board of Canada. When I wrote about this in 2006 there was only a low-res version available for viewing on the NFB site while Powers of Ten (1977), a very similar film by [...]

A typically splendid fin de siècle cover design by Léon Rudnicki for an 1898 volume of childhood memoirs by Jean Lorrain (1855–1906). The author was a flamboyantly homosexual poet, novelist and journalist whose addiction to ether and other excesses ended his life at the age of 50. Philippe Jullian is quoted on glbtq.com as saying [...]

Surreal case of the Dalí images and a battle over artistic licence

An ad campaign which can’t possibly be ignored given the present train of obsessions. Andrés Ramírez photographs a collection of tight packages for underwear manufacturer, Macho. I’m not sure what a group of Roman gladiators would be doing sparring in what appears to be a Bollywood boudoir like the one in Moulin Rouge! but, ya [...]

De Profundis.
I’ve known Maxwell Armfield’s work in the past mainly for the appearance of his paintings in books of late Victorian or even Pre-Raphaelite art. His depiction of Faustine (1904), which illustrates a Swinburne poem, is probably the most popular of these, with a subject resembling Rossetti’s portraits of Jane Morris. So it’s a surprise [...]

Less money to spend…less second-rate art | And not a moment too soon.

An engraving from circa 1470 by Antonio Pollaiuolo (1433–1498), presented in part for all those who arrive here searching for “naked men” although this also fits the men with swords category. One-handed Googlers will no doubt be disappointed by a mere drawing but that’s their problem. The British Museum site looks at the possible interpretations [...]

I love my Buddha Machine, the music release by Fm3 which comes as a set of sampled loops in a plastic case looking like a cheap pocket radio. This is one music work which can’t be downloaded since the physicality of the thing is as much a part of its attraction and purpose as the [...]

It came from outer space | Cosmic disco. Haven’t we had this before? Yeah but now it’s new again…

A curious short film over at Ubuweb by Chris Marker, John Chapman and Frank Simeone, depicting driftwood sculptures at the shore of San Francisco Bay which resemble the remnants of some Ballardian cargo cult. The film was made in 1981 and the sculptures look weathered and dated enough (rainbow stripes; what appears to be a [...]

Oscar Wilde’s faithless Christianity

Model Michael Whittaker photographed by James Demitri for Culture Magazine.
Via Beautiful.

Given this week’s conjunction of a Poe anniversary and the Presidential Inauguration, creating this was irresistible. Obamicon.me allows you to turn any photo into something resembling Shepard Fairey’s ubiquitous Obama poster. The only drawbacks are the way the processing stretches the type and the use of Arial for the title, a font which few self-respecting [...]

More Poe-etry and a work of my own this time, one of three pages illustrating Poe’s poem produced for the a Graphics Classics collection in 2004. These aren’t showcased anywhere on this site since I’ve never thought I did a very good job with the commission, it was a poor attempt to imitate Sätty’s collage [...]

Poe by Harry Clarke.
Happy birthday Edgar Allan Poe, born two hundred years ago today. I nearly missed this anniversary after a busy weekend. Rather than add to the mountain of praise for the writer, I thought I’d list some favourites among the numerous Poe-derived works in different media.
Illustrated books
For me the Harry Clarke edition of [...]

Angel-net (2004).
Amazing work by this Russian artist. Go and browse his site.
Via Fabulon.

Violina (2001).
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

top left: Leo & Diane Dillon (1969); top right: Tom Huffman (1968).
bottom left: Gray Morrow & Henry Berkowitz (1967); bottom right: no credit.
Great examples of typically florid Sixties’ cover design at Font of all Wisdom – Unique lettering in design, a Flickr pool. The masterful Leo & Diane Dillon illustrated many of Harlan Ellison’s [...]

Or should that be hussy? What’s the male equivalent of a hussy anyway? I think we should be told, etc. The beefcake model is George O’Mara and the 19th century military gear makes a change from the usual Greek or Roman props.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The men with swords archive

Ghosts of a vanished world | San Francisco and Milk.

Patrick McGoohan as Number Six.
“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”
The Prisoner, which ran for seventeen episodes from 1967 to 1968, was the best original drama series there’s ever been on television. Period, as Harlan Ellison would say. Best because it grabbed the format of [...]

Albrecht Dürer’s Self-portrait of 1498 as revealed by a new collaboration between Madrid’s Prado Museum and Google Earth. Google has photographed a number of the Prado’s paintings in ultra-high resolution, allowing users of their atlas application to examine the pictures to a degree which the artists themselves wouldn’t have experienced without the use of a [...]

Continuing from yesterday’s post, these nameless characters were sketches for a proposed comic strip that writer Jamie Delano and I were planning in the mid-Nineties. We had a feeling that the long-neglected pirate genre was due for a revival and talked about a revisionist take on buccaneering which would dispense with the Robert Newton antics [...]

“For all the world I was led like a dancing bear” by NC Wyeth (1911).
This year’s reading began with a desire to explore some of the Robert Louis Stevenson volumes in my collection which I’ve so far neglected. At the moment I’m thinking of maybe reading everything I have by RLS, having begun with [...]

Third Eye Camera.
Two camera artworks by Wayne Martin Belger, aka Boy of Blue.
Yama is made from Aluminium, Titanium, Copper, Brass, Bronze Steel, Silver, Gold, Mercury with 4 Sapphires, 3 Rubies (The one at Yama’s third eye was $5000.00), Asian and American Turquoise, Sand, Blood, and 9 Opals inlayed in the Skull. The film loading system [...]

Speculative designs for kitchen utensils by artist and designer Sayaka Yamamoto.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Elizabeth Goluch’s precious metal insects
• Kelly McCallum’s insect art
• Thomas Paul’s sealife
• Laura Zindel’s ceramics
• The art of Jo Whaley
• The art of Philippe Wolfers, 1858–1929
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• Lucien Gaillard
• Insect Lab

A new book cover design which I’m posting slightly ahead of time—it still needs a suitable blurb adding—since Jeff VanderMeer was eager to show it to his readers. You can see it bigger size here.
Finch is the third book in Jeff’s cycle of unique fantasy novels and stories about the city of Ambergris. This book [...]

I think we’d guess the content even without the illustration. I love the phallic arch; no doubt if this was a Gothic style it would be Perpendickular (ouch!). From a collection of gay pulp novels at Homobilia. In a similar fashion there’s a page of book covers at Miss Magnolia Thunderpussy’s Flickr collection which I [...]

Some work news. I finished this CD design last year but, as is often the case with these things, it’s taken a while to make its way into the world. This was the final piece of the Mindscape of Alan Moore project and it’s probably the last thing I’ll do which makes use of the [...]

Of course Tintin’s gay. Ask Snowy | Matthew Parris examines the evidence.

End of the road for Kraftwerk founder | Florian Schneider leaves Kling Klang.

Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton dies

I thought I might have exhausted this line of pursuit until I decided to search for the Passage des Panoramas, one of the first of the Parisian arcades which so entranced Walter Benjamin. This particular arcade dates from 1799 and was named after the painted panoramas which used to be one of the attractions on [...]

Do you detect a theme here? The 360º Cities site which I linked to yesterday won’t be news to some since its panorama views are now incorporated into Google Earth. I hadn’t fully investigated it before, however, so I wasted some time today wandering the streets of Bruges almost as you would in a computer [...]

Looking at panoramas of Venice yesterday reminded me of this panorama of my own which I pieced together after a trip to Paris two years ago. (See the very long version unsqueezed here.) The location was the small park at the point of the Île de la Cité where the Seine divides in two.
For some [...]

Piazza San Marco.
Gilles Vidal’s 360º panoramas are justly celebrated but some of his photos benefit more from the location than others. The cathedral of St Cecilia is a great example of this, as is the city of Venice in this remarkable series of views. As well as showing a few less obvious locations, Vidal [...]

Antony and the Johnsons light up 2009

Secret of the White Rose
| Carl Orff and the Nazis.