One day I really will have exhausted this subject but for the moment here’s another look at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. I’d downloaded this photo album months ago from the excellent resources at the University of Heidelberg then promptly forgot all about it. The book is of interest for the variety of views [...]
I never used a graphics tablet for drawing, in the past if I needed to draw something I’d use pencil and paper then scan the results. In recent years, however, I’ve grown dissatisfied with this process, especially after I rearranged my work area and packed away the space-hogging Ikea table I used to use as [...]
Undulating terrain: Stalker (1979). Marking the boundaries of an obsession, this post follows the discovery last week of the Sine Fiction soundtracks for science fiction novels, one of which was five tracks by Jos Smolders for Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. That album set me wondering what other recordings might have been inspired by [...]
I’m generally indifferent to panoramic views of cities, especially London where the sprawl lacks the distinct contours of Manhattan or the Napoléonic severity of Hausmann’s Paris. This view is different, however, being a 320 gigapixel panorama of the capital seen from the top of the BT Tower. This view is currently the world’s largest panoramic [...]
Quantum Entanglement by Duda Lanna. • An hour-long electronica mix (with the Düül rocking out at the end) by Chris Carter for Ninja Tune’s Solid Steel Radio Show. • “…a clothes-optional Rosicrucian jamboree.”: Strange Flowers on the paintings of Elisàr von Kupffer. • A Paste review of volume 2 of The Graphic Canon has some [...]
British animator Bob Godfrey died this week but as a result of copyright restrictions there’s little of his work on YouTube aside from the films he made for children’s television in the 1970s and 1980s. One of those series, Roobarb (1974), is a personal favourite, but Godfrey had a long career in animation, and worked [...]
The Annunciation (c. 1472). One pleasure of seeing paintings in an art gallery is the ability to scrutinise details. I like to be able to see that, yes, Picasso did indeed use a single stroke of the brush beginning here and ending here. Backgrounds are a recurrent source of interest if you’ve ever tried any [...]
Naked Young Man (1937). The work of Russian painter Konstantin Somov has a decent presence on the web, albeit separated into his public works which comprised portraits, landscapes and illustrations, and his more private, homoerotic studies of voluptuous Russian men. The former can be seen at WikiPaintings or The Atheneum where there’s a recurrent theme [...]
Interzone is a selection of William Burroughs recordings mixed with electronic music and other pieces such as extracts from Howard Shore & Ornette Coleman’s Naked Lunch soundtrack: A tribute to ‘El Hombre Invisible’. It features some of my favourite readings, to which I’ve added music by John Zorn (from his Burroughs-inspired work), Tod Dockstader, Arne [...]
Sine Fiction VI: Nova Express (2003) by Eucci. More Burroughsian music, and a selection that includes another interpretation of The Ticket That Exploded. Sine Fiction is a music project curated by Aimé Dontigny that commissions electronic artists to provide soundtracks to science fiction novels. The project has been running since 2000, and has so far managed [...]
The book that made my head explode when I was 16. Calder & Boyars edition, 1968; design by John Sewell. Years ago the idea of an opera based on The Ticket That Exploded would have been a wry joke: a novel brimming with text that’s fragmented even by Burroughs’ standards, as well as the usual [...]
Bestia Apocalypsi (2000) by Konstantin Kalynovych. • A funding page for Better Things: The Life and Choices of Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Maria Paz Cabardo’s documentary film about the late comic artist and illustrator. • Phantasmaphile’s Pam Grossman has declared 2013 to be the Year of the Witch. • At WFMU: The Space Ghost Coast To [...]
The title of Georges Méliès’Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) is usually given the English translation of A Trip to the Moon, the word “trip” being an apt one when the lunar voyagers discover a landscape of giant mushrooms and crab-clawed inhabitants similar to the Selenites in HG Wells’ The First Men in the Moon [...]
Scriabin: Symphony no 3; Arensky: Silhouettes (1992) by Neeme Järvi. The Delville painting from yesterday’s post seems popular with classical recordings, this is only one example of its use, chosen here because some of the music is Scriabin for whom Delville created a sheet music illustration in 1912. Delville’s other work is understandably popular in [...]
L’amour des âmes (1900) by Jean Delville. Another of the many connections between the Symbolism and psychedelic poster art, the mystically-inclined Jean Delville (1867–1953) may at least have approved of the addition of a yin-yang symbol to his painting of drifting souls. I was originally going to post Delville’s Pour L’art poster design since I’ve [...]
Seven and Seven Is (1967), a single by Love. Celebrating seven years of this here blawg with a bunch of sevens. But first, the stats which (according to WordPress’s own meter) say “This blog was viewed about 2,300,000 times in 2012″. The caveat there is that many people visit these pages simply to see a [...]
A little something for Darwin Day, and a collection of illustrations I hadn’t seen before. The Cephalopoda of the Hawaiian Islands (1914) is another title in the splendid (and huge) collection of the Biodiversity Heritage Library whose Flickr sets have been linked here before. Some of those prior examples have ended up being collaged into [...]
Belator (2013) by Christiane Vleugels. With this series about the Flandrin pose being the oldest on the blog—the initial post was Feb 16, 2006—the whole thing has gradually evolved from a diverting observation to the unearthing of a trend that runs deeper and further than I expected. Christiane Vleugels is a Belgian artist with a [...]
A Chinese postage stamp celebrating the Year of the Snake. • Cyclopean is a collaboration from Burnt Friedman, Jono Podmore and Can founding members Jaki Liebezeit, and Irmin Schmidt. The Quietus has a preview of all the tracks from their forthcoming EP. Great stuff. • Ten Things You (Possibly) Don’t Know About Kraftwerk. Related: a [...]
The Sin (1894). Some pictures in honour of the Chinese year of the Water Snake which begins this Sunday. Paintings of women with snakes are legion, even after you winnow out all the Eve and the Serpent pictures, so you need to narrow the field of view. Artists of the 19th century must have been [...]
Labyrinth (Westminster) by Mark Wallinger. A mandatory post, this one, seeing as how it combines two continual sources of interest: labyrinths and the London Underground transport system. Transport for London commissioned artist Mark Wallinger to create something for the 150th birthday celebrations of the Tube, the result being a series of 270 different labyrinth designs, [...]
L The P (1969) by Scaffold. Art: Ascending and Descending (1960). A follow-up to yesterday’s post. MC Escher lived long enough to see his work move from curiosities appealing to a small circle of print collectors, through enthusiasm among scientists and mathematicians, to mass acceptance in the late 1960s thanks, in part, to the general [...]
Design by Jurriaan Schrofer. That’s Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898–1972), the Dutch artist, and Jurriaan Schrofer (1926–90), the Dutch typographer and graphic designer. Aside from a shared nationality the pair had a similar interest in periodicity and incremental metamorphosis, something that’s strikingly apparent when you compare their works. I don’t know much about Schrofer so I can’t [...]
1: Nothing Is… (1966), an album of science fiction jazz by Sun Ra. What does the empty space of that ellipsis imply? 2: Strawberry Fields Forever (1967), a single by The Beatles. “Strawberry Fields / Nothing is real” Cover art by Sam Green. 3: Empty Space (2012), a science fiction novel by M. John Harrison. [...]
First editions of Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). I like Peter Mendelsund’s book cover designs so it’s good to find the designer given the opportunity to provide new covers for James Joyce. Mendelsund’s blog post announcing the news mentions nothing about his intentions, instead we have a reminiscence about Ireland à la Molly Bloom, [...]
Weird Tales, October 1933. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. • Michael Moorcock’s novels are being republished this year by Gollancz in a range of print and digital editions. Publishing Perspectives asks Is Now a Perfect Time for a Michael Moorcock Revival? • Related: Dangerous Minds posted The Chronicle of the Black Sword: A Sword & Sorcery [...]
The print work of French artist Érik Desmazières has featured here on several occasions, and I’ve also had reason to mention more than once his aquatints and etchings which illustrate Jorge Luis Borges’ celebrated short story The Library of Babel (1941). The prints were produced in 1997 with a small book edition being published in [...]
Night Hand (1997). Many web searchers have arrived here recently looking for gay artists from Japan so here’s another. Seiji Inagaki was born in 1942, and describes himself as bisexual if you want to get all self-identifying about it. A lot of his drawings are the usual stuff of cute boys posing or having sex [...]
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