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Oh, Mr. Roeg, you’re wonderful, I love you! | Alan Moore gets justifiably excited.

The Steampunk design I created last year for Modofly (based on a formula by writer Jeff VanderMeer) is given a new lease of life with this colour version. Modofly produce decorated Moleskin books with a range of designs from some very talented artists. Previous graphics were laser-etched onto the boards but they’re now able to [...]

top left: Reflections of Friendship by Randy & Shelly Knapp; top right: Ostrich Egg by Frank Cascianni. bottom left: Double Marble Scope by Stan Griffith; bottom right: Heart of Fire by Jeffrey Balter. A few of the beautiful and remarkable kaleidoscope artworks at the Scherer Gallery. Most of these appear to be unique creations and [...]

Graphic artists condemn plans to ban erotic comics

The Kaleidoplex Light Organ, a kaleidoscope projector invented in the early Seventies by Marshall Yaeger to create a visual accompaniment for organ music performances. The image [the Kaleidoplex] projects can be described most accurately and scientifically as an irregularly pulsating and continuously changing octagonal star or circular rosette centered on a circular field of smaller [...]

Fade away: Chris Marker | La Jetée and Immemory.

Continuing an occasional series. The poster at the top left is the unused Ministry of Information design created to maintain Britain’s resolve after war had been declared in September 1939. This simple slogan struck a chord recently among Britons sick of the climate of fear, security theatre and authoritarian coercion which, deliberately or not, appears [...]

National Portrait Gallery snubs Kylie Minogue and picks Nelson Mandela for gay icons list

Coincidence abounds: on Wednesday I was following a few referral URLs to see who’d been linking here and was led to a Lexic.us page about hermaphrodites which in turn had me looking again at the wonderful Borghese Hermaphroditus in the Louvre. Thursday’s postal delivery brought issue 1 of The Gnostic which prominently features the Louvre [...]

How else to name this obsession? (Which, it should be noted, is more a mild preoccupation than a full-on fetish.) Xiphoid isn’t a word one hears very often: \Xiph”oid\ (?; 277), a. [Gr. ? sword-shaped; xi`fos a sword + ? form, shape: cf. F. xiphoide.] (Anat.) (a) Like a sword; ensiform. (b) Of or pertaining [...]

The White Peacock (1910). A typical piece of mysterious erotica by Austrian illustrator and pornographer Franz von Bayros (1866–1924). Like all good Decadents, Bayros used peacocks and peacock feathers as decorative motifs in his pictures but this is the first I’ve seen where the peacock itself is the result of amorous attention. If that sounds [...]

A post for Ada Lovelace Day, “an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.” Susan Kare was, and still is, a graphic designer specialising in user interface graphics. Facebook users may recognise her gift icons but her earlier work is even more familiar to Macintosh users since it was her [...]

An example from this Flickr set. Hell is a City is a Hammer melodrama from 1960 directed by Val Guest, mentioned here recently for his earlier The Day the Earth Caught Fire. This one doesn’t succeed quite as well, being a misguided attempt to do a film noir in Manchester. The poster tries to disguise [...]

Better late than never mentioning this exhibition which has been running at Riflemaker, 79 Beak Street, London, since mid-January. The exhibition features those artists, writers and musicians who acknowledge the need to reach a heightened or ‘altered state’ in order to create their work. We look at the mystery of the creative act; not the [...]

A stunning photo set of model Luciano Gossmann by Brazilian photographer Didio. Via VGL.

Backdrop for the League of Composers’ production, Philadelphia, 1930. Something for the vernal equinox. The painting is a stage design by artist, writer and theatre designer Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) for an American production of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Roerich designed the costumes and decor for the riotous Paris performance of 1913 and the Roerich Museum [...]

left: No title or date; right: Joker from a playing card set (1924). A recent post by Silent-Porn-Star draws my attention to Swedish illustrator and cartoonist Einar Nerman (1888–1983) whose work I don’t recall having come across before. There isn’t much available to see online unfortunately, a shame as SPS’s posting of a 1926 cigarette [...]

Evolution 4. Tableaux by a Norwegian artist whose photographs capture mundane objects in remote settings. I especially like these lines of migrating household lamps. Previously on { feuilleton } • Lightmark • Maximum Silence by Giancarlo Neri

Louis Rhead (1916). Continuing from the weekend’s book discovery, a browse at the Internet Archive reveals many scanned editions of the Arabian Nights. No surprise given the enduring popularity of the stories, and no surprise either that the texts are of variable quality, most of them diluted from the earthy and inventive originals to the [...]

Alan Moore: an extraordinary gentleman | Novelist, magician and “guru of the graphic novel” Alan Moore talks to Steve Rose about Watchmen, the dark side of Hollywood and the morality of pornography.

Ban them! How Pete and Dud fell foul of the law yet still escaped prosecution

Corps & Graphiques 2 (2004). Ecstatic homoerotica by Patrick Gerbier. Elsewhere on { feuilleton } • The gay artists archive

This weekend’s book purchase looks like an expensive volume but was actually pretty reasonably-priced for a book that’s 126 years old. This is no. III of a three-volume set of the Thousand and One Nights translated by Edward William Lane, published by Chatto & Windus in 1883. I bought it mainly for the copious wood [...]

Lorca was censored to hide his sexuality, biographer reveals

The Chemical Wedding by Madeline Von Foerster (2008). Art lovers in the NYC area are advised to get down to the Saturday opening of this exhibition at the Dabora Gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for some great paintings and a free glass of absinthe. Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists is curated by Pam Grossman who [...]

Sample designs from Prismes : 40 planches de dessins et coloris nouveaux (1931) by EA Séguy. Another great print set at NYPL Digital Gallery. Previously on { feuilleton } • The art of Thayaht, 1893–1959 • The Mentor • The art of Cassandre, 1901–1968 • The Decorative Age • The World in 2030

“Lenin is dead but the Russian Communist Party lives on” (no date). More typography and yet more Soviet poster art which seems perennially popular with graphic designers. Bold Constructivist designs like this example are part of the reason why: over 80 years old yet still striking. Type foundry P22 have a set of Constructivist fonts [...]

Marvellous. Typefaces sorted by popularity according to surveys. Interesting for this Bodoni fan finding Bodoni as the first serif at no. 3. Some surprises too—is Univers really that popular? Created by Squidspot. See the whole thing here. Via Metafilter.

‘Sir, are you queer?’ | Fear of upsetting parents and faith groups is deterring teachers from tackling homophobia.

Haven’t had one of these for a while. Artist and photographer Diego Lago has this version of the Flandrin pose on his Flickr pages. He also seems to have used it as a model for this painting. Elsewhere on { feuilleton } • The recurrent pose archive

A largely-wordless tour of Gaudí’s architecture by the director of Woman in the Dunes (1964). Like that earlier film this also features a score by the composer Toru Takemitsu. I hadn’t realised before that the famous dragon gate (above) at the entrance to the Parc Güell, Barcelona, was as large as it is. Teshigahara’s documentary [...]

Down and out in Paris | Jeanette Winterson revisits Shakespeare and Company.

Fireflies on the Water by Yayoi Kusama (2002). One of my favourite contemporary artworks, Fireflies on the Water by Yayoi Kusama, receives a new showing at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Her mirrored room features 150 lights and a pool of water and while most photos show an impressive work, none of them can match [...]

Another authorless design: Vertigo #6360 616 (1973). Things we did (or didn’t) learn about album cover design this week. • The jury is still out as to whether Barney Bubbles designed the covers for the UK releases of Kraftwerk’s third and fourth albums, Ralf and Florian and Autobahn. BB experts Rebecca & Mike did clarify [...]

We’ve waited 21 years… | Erol Alkan and Richard Norris want a new Summer of Love.

Rorschach from The Mindscape of Alan Moore. The hype over the Watchmen film reached critical mass this week and as a consequence there’s been a spike of interest in the two Alan Moore interviews I posted in 2006, with Empire magazine and other movie sites linking here. I won’t bore you with my lack of [...]

With sound effects, yet, so it’s like you’re there. 360º views by Peter McReady. Via New Scientist. Elsewhere on { feuilleton } • The panoramas archive

Philip José Farmer: Prolific and influential science-fiction writer

Don’t try this at home… Model Clark photographed by Neil Bradley as part of a deviantART set. Elsewhere on { feuilleton } • The men with swords archive Previously on { feuilleton } • Secret Lives of the Samurai

Autobahn by Kraftwerk; Vertigo #6360 620. Colin Buttimer was in touch last week to let me know he’d copied my Barney Bubbles post (with my permission) to his excellent new site, Hard Format, which is devoted to the art of music design. In the intro to that piece he repeats something he’d mentioned to me [...]