John – Page 914 – { feuilleton }

The London Oasis

The London Oasis, first seen on Clerkenwell Green last summer, has been resurrected at the Chelsea Flower Show.

London Oasis opened on 19th June 2006 as a temporary structure on Clerkenwell Green.

Designed by architect Laurie Chetwood, the Oasis is a demonstration of sustainability and renewable energy working with architecture to provide a tranquil oasis for London.

The 12 metre high kinetic structure mimics the design of a growing flower: its photovoltaic “petals” open and close in response to the sun and the moon utilising daylight to generate power. This is supplemented by a hydrogen fuel cell and wind turbine to make it self-sufficient. It even uses rainwater it has collected for irrigation and cooling.

At the base, the Oasis has five “pods” inside which people are secluded from the noisy and polluted city surroundings, enjoying cleaner cooled air and relaxing sounds. There are also five further areas providing social rendezvous and venues for entertainment.

The Oasis is “smart” in that it interacts with the environment around it. It senses time, the weather and people, and responds accordingly. At night, it uses energy stored during the day to power a beacon in the form of a light show which responds to the movement of people around.

• Official site
• Guardian feature
• Flickr photos

The Chronicles of Clovis and other sarcastic delights

This week’s book purchase (yes, dear reader, it never ends, there are merely lulls between one indulgence of the vice and the next) is a small Bodley Head volume that comprises part of the collected works of Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), or “Saki” as he’s better known. I have Saki’s complete works already in a big fat Penguin collection but I like these small books that were the common format for portable reading prior to the invention of the paperback. Over a number of years I’ve managed to collect about half of the Tusitala Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s complete works which are similarly-sized blue volumes (one in a rare leather binding), simply through chance finds in secondhand shops.

This particular book is a 1929 reprint of The Chronicles of Clovis collection first published in 1911 and, like the Stevenson volumes, has the author’s signature blocked in gold on the cover. The introduction is by AA Milne and I’m taking the liberty of reproducing it in full below, partly out of laziness and partly because he does a good job of presenting the man and his work.

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The art of John Austen, 1886–1948

A few drawings by British illustrator John Austen (1886–1948), like Patten Wilson another artist whose work is hard to come by today. Austen was one of the many young illustrators over whom Aubrey Beardsley’s etiolated shadow fell from 1900 onwards and it’s the first ten years of Austen’s work I find most interesting, mainly because of the Beardsley stylings. He’s not as original or as elegant as Harry Clarke but he’s a lot better than the frequently overrated (yet interesting for other reasons) Hans Henning Voigt, or Alastair as he preferred to be known.

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Toxicboy

left: Mikel; right: Matt.

Toxicboy aka Mikel from Montreal, is a photographer as stunningly gorgeous as many of his models, so his “self-centred self portraits” are entirely justified, for this viewer at least. He enhances some of his pictures with subtle and artful digital manipulation, as with the photo above showing three incarnations of the same model, Matt. The androgynous pictures in his “Maiden to Man” series merge gender in a way that few photographers—gay or straight—seem willing to explore, despite the possibilities that Photoshop suggests. The possibilities suggested by three identical boys in the same bed is something we can only dream about.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Czanara’s Hermaphrodite Angel

My pastiches

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #3 (1992).

Following from the post about an art forgery exhibition (and Eddie Campbell discussing his American Gothic cover for Bacchus), I thought I’d post some of my own forgeries, or pastiches as we call them when no deception is intended.

Reverbstorm was the Lord Horror comic series I was creating with David Britton for Savoy in the 1990s. The Modernist techniques of collage (as in the work of Picasso and others) and quotation (as in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land) became themes in themselves as the series developed, so it seemed natural to imitate the styles of various artists as we went along. Pastiche is also a chance to flagrantly show off, of course, and I can’t deny that this was also one of my impulses here.

Issue #3 of Reverbstorm had marauding apes as its theme, from the Rue Morgue to Tarzan and King Kong, so I had the idea of doing an ape cover in the style of the celebrated paintings by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593) which make human heads out of fruit, flowers or animals. Easy enough to have the idea but making it work took a lot of effort and required careful sketching beforehand, something I rarely do. The painting was gouache on board, a medium I’d been using for years and this was about the last gouache work I did before switching to acrylics.

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