Weekend links 283

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Behind by Lisa Wassmann.

• “Without space art, nobody would know what Mars would look like.” Artist David A. Hardy talking to Nadja Sayej about a life spent painting the cosmos and—briefly—working for Hawkwind. Visions of Space, an exhibition of astronomical art, is at the Wells & Mendip Museum throughout November.

• Mixes of the week: Something Beautiful Happened by Cafe Kaput; Autumn Vybes: Mist, Mystery and Motion by Abigail Ward; and Secret Thirteen Mix 166 by Ron Morelli.

• More Ghost Box: Two new singles in the Other Voices series will be released next month. And the label is profiled in the latest issue of Electronic Sound magazine.

It breaks my heart when one writer tells another what she can or cannot do. I once knew a woman, a professor of literature, who said that Flaubert had no right to write Madame Bovary because he was a man. Such dangerous foolishness! This is just another form that dogmatic thinking takes. And it seems to me that the imagining mind—which is also a profoundly human mind—must be unfettered, boundless. To write from the perspective of another’s world demands a generous and a rigorous leap of the spirit; it demands empathy and mindfulness. Writing is so much about subverting dogmatisms of all kinds, above all the ones that insist you cannot go there! You must not say that! Writers need to go anywhere, to take anything on. And the only rule is to do it well.

Rikki Ducornet in a retrospective feature at Dennis Cooper’s blog

• “Horror at its best has always existed outside the mainstream,” says Brian Ennis in another celebratory piece about Thomas Ligotti.

• Alan Clarke & David Rudkin’s Penda’s Fen receives another cinema screening next week at the Sallis Benney Theatre, Brighton.

• “[David] Lynch’s films abound with gnomic pronouncements and incantations,” says Dennis Lim.

Stars of the Lid play a tremendous hour-long set at St. Agnes Church in Brooklyn.

Drawn in Stereo: a book of music-related art and illustration by Michael Gillette.

• At Dangerous Minds: Only the coolest people get to sit in the wicker peacock chair.

Everything Is Erotic Therefore Everything Is Exhausting by Johanna Hedva.

Moon Mist (1961) by The Out-Islanders | River Mist (1989) by Brian Eno | Black Mist (Long Version) (2013) by Pye Corner Audio

Remembering Arthurfest

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The Arthur table. Free mags!

Arthurfest is an as-yet unreleased feature-length documentary by Lance Bangs which captured the two-day music festival of that name in Barnsdall Art Park, Los Angeles. The festival took place ten years ago to the day, and was the first such event organised by the sorely missed Arthur magazine. I was fortunate to witness some of the stunning performances on the park’s tree-bedecked plateau overlooking East Hollywood. Bangs’ cameras were hard to miss at the time—I even photographed one of them—but I’ve never seen any of the footage of the event until the appearance of a teaser which has been posted in advance of a tenth anniversary screening this weekend at Cinefamily, Los Angeles. This is tantalising stuff for the way the cameras bring the bands so much closer than they were when viewed at crowd level. There was also a lot happening each day on three different stages, one of which was indoors in the park’s Gallery Theatre, so it was impossible to see everything. Earth and Sunn O))) played inside the theatre but I missed both their shows as a result of a vampire-like reluctance to queue for a seat in the merciless sunlight. (I did get to drink Jack Daniel’s with the Sunn O))) guys, however…) Fingers crossed that Bangs’ film gets a proper release soon so the rest of us can see it. Meanwhile, here’s a few of my photos of the event…

Update: Arthur‘s Jay Babcock alerts me to footage of the late Jack Rose at the Arthurfest. Also at Lance Bangs’ channel there’s some of the performance by The Juan MacLean. Thanks, Jay!

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The main stage.

Continue reading “Remembering Arthurfest”

Dark arts

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Thomas Street, Providence: on the left is the Fleur-de-Lys Studios; two doors along is the Dodge House Gallery which housed an additional part of the art exhibition; the Providence Art Club is the red-brick building next door.

I’m back from Providence, returned early on Tuesday but took the day off to recover from jet lag. The city was hot and humid for much of the time but I didn’t mind that, it was good to be able to walk around in the evening without a jacket, something that seldom happens here. I don’t go to many conventions so although NecronomiCon was the best I’ve been to, there isn’t a great deal of competition. I always enjoy meeting and talking to creators of any stripe—writers, artists, filmmakers, editors, etc—and it’s a pleasure to meet readers face to face, but conventions in general aren’t always attractive in themselves. NecronomiCon was inviting for being relatively small and with a strong focus not just on Lovecraft but on weird fiction as a whole: there were panels on Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, Robert Chambers, and one on the legacy of what M. John Harrison designated “the New Weird”. I’ve been told that if there’s a NecronomiCon in 2017 the intention is to develop this area of discussion.

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And then there’s Providence itself: Lovecraft’s stories will read in a very different light now I’ve visited the city that inspired so much of his work. The one walking excursion I took to College Hill was curtailed by an afternoon of 30-degree temperatures but I did get to see a small part of Angell Street where Lovecraft lived for many years, and I also walked down Benefit Street as far as house number 135, familiar to readers as The Shunned House. The architecture of Providence is a delight, not only the Colonial buildings but the also the more recent vernacular styles of the Downtown area. Even the heat seemed connected to Lovecraft and his abhorrence of cold weather; in later years he took sightseeing trips down to Florida so I’m sure he wouldn’t have complained about the hot sun or the swampy air.

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The massive and weighty door of the Art Club.

The main reason to be there was for the art exhibition, of course, and for that the venue couldn’t have been better. The Providence Art Club is mentioned in The Call of Cthulhu as a rather staid organisation that disapproves of Henry Anthony Wilcox who works down the street at the Fleur-de-Lys Studios; I spoke to a couple of current Art Club members, and was amused to hear that the establishment still maintains a somewhat conservative position. But the presence of so much bizarre and grotesque art in the gallery was evidence of a loosening of attitudes that Wilcox and Pickman couldn’t have managed in their day. A selection of my photographs follows below; I took over 250 photos but really should have taken more, especially of the buildings. The Providence Art Club has a good collection of photos from the opening night, some of which include me caught uncomfortably in front of a camera lens.

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Some acknowledgements: I’ve already thanked Niels-Viggo Hobbs and The joey Zone for inviting me there but I’ll do so again. Big thanks also to Carmen Marusich who spent most of her time behind the counter at Lovecraft Arts & Sciences in the Arcade; to print-wrangler Brian Mullen who very generously spent an afternoon ferrying me around various stores in search of a phone charger before smartly suggesting I try the USB port in the TV at the hotel (something I should have thought of); and to Michael Rose and company at the Providence Art Club for allowing us into their beautiful building. Shouts and thanks to: Sara Bardi, Michael Bukowski, Syl Disjonk, Jason C. Eckhardt, Bob Eggleton, Dave Felton, Stephen Gervais, Mike Knives, Robert H. Knox, Allen Koszowski, Henrik Möller, Mallory O’Meara, Gage Prentiss, Skinner, Jason Thompson, Frank H. Woodward (at last!), Josh Yelle, and all those who bought artwork, offered compliments or came to see the art and the panel discussions.

Finally…Earth! I’ve been listening to the band a great deal this year so I’m predisposed to enjoy any live event, but their performance in the gilded splendour of the Columbia Theatre on Federal Hill really knocked me out. An outstanding set with great sound and great support acts too, especially Elder. All this taking place a couple of streets away from the location of Lovecraft’s Starry Wisdom church; I was in seventh heaven.

And now the photos…

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The title page entity from Lovecraft’s Monsters which was named Tentacles for the exhibition.

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My works were in a gallery room on their own, guarded by the title page thing from Lovecraft’s Monsters.

Continue reading “Dark arts”

Providential

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As should be evident by now, I’m off to Providence for NecronomiCon 2015 so the blog will be taking a break for a few days. The archive feature will be in operation during this time to pull up random posts from the past.

In a previous post about NecronomiCon I mentioned having designed a cover for the convention booklet so here it is. If all goes to plan, the gold lattice should be printed as a metallic ink overlay. The pentagonal labyrinth is a borrowing from the George Hay Necronomicon (see this post) but the sigils are my own invention; each one relates to a specific Lovecraftian deity but I’ll let people guess the assignations. The Providence postcard is a genuine one that I doctored slightly. This was a fortuitous find since some of the locations have connections with the convention. Anyone curious about the convention’s progress is advised to check the Facebook page.

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NecronomiCon Providence 2015

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Next month I’ll be in Providence, Rhode Island, where I’m the Artist Guest of Honour for NecronomiCon Providence 2015. This is an honour for me in more ways than one: the city of Providence, or its representation in the spectral prose of HP Lovecraft, has occupied a fair amount of my creative life, especially in the comic-strip adaptations I was drawing in the 1980s. I just hope the citizens of Providence can forgive the liberties I took with the city’s architecture in The Haunter of the Dark where the buildings owe far more to the architecture of Scotland than they do to New England.

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A nameless entity from Lovecraft’s Monsters (2014).

The main event where I’m concerned will be the Ars Necronomica art show at the Providence Art Club on Thomas Street. This is a few doors away from the beautiful Fleur-De-Lys Studios, a building that Lovecraft mentions in The Call of Cthulhu, and which (having done some research this time) filled a panel in my adaptation. In the story the building is the home of eccentric artist Henry Wilcox so it’s a dizzying prospect to find my own art being exhibited a few doors away. Among my works there will be print enlargements of some of the illustrations from last year’s Lovecraft’s Monsters, Ellen Datlow’s expertly edited collection of recent Lovecraftiana; and the piece I created in 2007 for the Exhibition of Unspeakable Things at Maison d’Ailleurs, Switzerland, has been refashioned especially for this show. My work isn’t the only art on display, there’ll be contributions from 50 other artists which I think must make the event one of the largest Lovecraftian art shows staged anywhere. The show opens on August 11th but the official opening will be on the 20th which happens to be Lovecraft’s 125th birthday. Big thanks to Joe Shea, Niels Hobbs et al for arranging everything.

The convention begins on the 21st, and rather than attempt to summarise the astonishing range of events it’s easier to provide links to the main schedule and the additional programming. For anyone interested in attending, there are still day passes available, while many of the additional events are open to the public. Oh, and I’ve also designed the cover for the convention booklet so attendees will be able to get their copy defaced by my signature. (I’m probably making work for myself here, aren’t I?) And I’ve just noticed that there’s a preview of the booklet cover on the convention Facebook page.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
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