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• • • Being a journal by artist and designer John Coulthart, cataloguing interests, obsessions and passing enthusiasms.

Archive for the {fantasy} category

 

Virtual Alice

No, I didn’t go searching for this, I had my fill of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland last month. The British Library website is a lot more amenable than it used to be for the casual browser, and one of its newer sections is a small collection of what they call virtual books which enable you [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {fantasy}, {illustrators}, {work} | No comments »

 


The Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest

Bookplate by Denis Kostromitin.
Following the recent postings of covers and illustrations from Der Orchideengarten, Will at A Journey Round My Skull posts the results of his Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest which encouraged illustrators to create an Orchideengarten-styled bookplate design. You can see the winner and many other splendid entries on his pages. I fully intended [...]

Posted in {art}, {black and white}, {books}, {fantasy}, {horror}, {illustrators}, {magazines} | No comments »

 


Der Orchideengarten illustrated

Halloween approaches and as a precursor it’s a great pleasure to be able to post a selection of interior illustrations from Der Orchideengarten, courtesy of Will at A Journey Round My Skull. Der Orchideengarten was a German magazine of weird fiction which ran for 51 issues from 1919 to 1921 and whose existence [...]

Posted in {art}, {black and white}, {fantasy}, {horror}, {illustrators}, {magazines} | 6 comments »

 


Through the Wonderwall

It’s taken me years but the recent obsession with UK psychedelia led me to finally watch Joe Massot’s piece of cinematic fluff from 1968, Wonderwall, a film distinguished primarily for its score by George Harrison (with Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton playing pseudonymously), and its title which was swiped years later by a bunch of [...]

Posted in {art}, {fantasy}, {film}, {gay}, {music}, {psychedelia} | 5 comments »

 


Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar

So I had a bright idea at the end of September… Instead of rehashing old work for a CafePress calendar design, I thought I’d try something new. I hadn’t done any artwork for myself all year, everything I’d been working on was a commission of some sort. In addition to that, I’d spent a large [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {design}, {fantasy}, {psychedelia}, {work} | 19 comments »

 


Mervyn Peake at Maison d’Ailleurs

I should have mentioned this a lot sooner considering the museum sent me a copy of the exhibition prospectus. Maison d’Ailleurs is the Museum of Science Fiction, Utopia and Extraordinary Journeys in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, and their current exhibition is Lines of Flight—Mervyn Peake, the Illustrated Work. Yverdon-les-Bains is too out of the way for most [...]

Posted in {art}, {black and white}, {books}, {fantasy}, {illustrators} | 5 comments »

 


Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

As you might expect, Archive.org has a lot of Alice in Wonderland adaptations, including a silent film version whose poor picture quality makes any attempt to watch it a chore. Among the many books in their collection one of the best is this illustrated edition from 1907 by Charles Robinson, brother of the equally talented [...]

Posted in {art}, {black and white}, {books}, {fantasy}, {illustrators} | No comments »

 


Humpty Dumpty variations

Humpty Dumpty by EB Thurstan (1930).
A preoccupation of the past couple of weeks has been Lewis Carroll’s Alice books as I’ve been working on an Alice in Wonderland project which I’ll unveil shortly. Looking around at some of the numerous visual interpretations of the stories I came across two portfolios I hadn’t seen before [...]

Posted in {art}, {black and white}, {books}, {comics}, {fantasy}, {illustrators}, {work} | 8 comments »

 


Philip Pullman ranked second on US banned books list

Philip Pullman ranked second on US banned books list

Posted in {books}, {fantasy}, {noted}, {politics}, {religion} | 1 comment »

 


Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism

Le Bout du monde by Leonor Fini (1948).
Yes, I’ll definitely be going to see this one.
The first major exhibition of women artists and Surrealism to be held in Europe, Angels of Anarchy, opens this autumn at Manchester Art Gallery.
Featuring over 150 artworks by 32 women artists, the exhibition is a celebration of the crucial, but [...]

Posted in {art}, {fantasy}, {painting}, {sculpture}, {surrealism} | 5 comments »

 


Design as virus #11: Burne Hogarth

Mighty Baby (1969). Illustration by Martin Sharp.

Yet another album cover prompts this post, part of an occasional series. Mighty Baby were a British rock band who formed out of psychedelic group The Action in the late Sixties, and their music is fairly typical of the period, being “heavy” without any of the psych trappings which—for [...]

Posted in {art}, {comics}, {design}, {fantasy}, {illustrators}, {music}, {psychedelia}, {pulp}, {work} | 17 comments »

 


Echoes of the Cities

Mysterieux retour du Capitaine Nemo.
This week has been incredibly hectic work-wise but I’ve managed to keep these posts going, so here’s the last one devoted to an appreciation of the Cités Obscures of François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. A week of posts barely scratches the surface of their vast and involved creation of alternate worlds, [...]

Posted in {architecture}, {art}, {books}, {borges}, {cities}, {comics}, {fantasy}, {illustrators}, {science fiction} | No comments »

 


Further tales from the Obscure World

L’enfant penchée.

We’re at the penultimate post in this week-long tribute to the Cités Obscures series of François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, and there isn’t enough space left to cover some of the more recent volumes in detail. What follows is a quick skate through three more major works.

L’enfant penchée.
L’enfant penchée (1996), or The Leaning Child, [...]

Posted in {architecture}, {art nouveau}, {art}, {books}, {cities}, {comics}, {design}, {fantasy}, {illustrators}, {science fiction} | 1 comment »

 


La route d’Armilia by Schuiten & Peeters

Ferdinand and Hella look down on the skyscrapers of Brüsel.
La route d’Armilia (1988) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the next substantial story in the Cités Obscures series after La Tour; there was also a book about transportation in the Obscure World, L’Encyclopédie des transports présents et à venir, published the same year. La [...]

Posted in {architecture}, {art}, {books}, {cities}, {comics}, {design}, {fantasy}, {illustrators}, {science fiction} | 5 comments »

 


La Tour by Schuiten & Peeters

La Tour (1987) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the third story in the Cités Obscures series, although it’s the fourth volume if you want to be strictly canon about things, L’achivist, a guide to places in the Obscure World, having preceded it.

Carcere Oscura by Piranesi (1750).
This is another book where Schuiten and Peeters’ [...]

Posted in {architecture}, {art}, {black and white}, {books}, {cities}, {comics}, {fantasy}, {illustrators} | 3 comments »

 


La fièvre d’Urbicande by Schuiten & Peeters

La fièvre d’Urbicande (1985) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the second volume in the Cités Obscures series. This was the one which captured my attention the most when I first saw it. The book opens with a foreword by the central character, Robick, chief architect of the city of Urbicande, in which he [...]

Posted in {architecture}, {art}, {books}, {cities}, {comics}, {design}, {fantasy}, {illustrators}, {music} | 6 comments »

 


Les Murailles de Samaris by Schuiten & Peeters

The Obscure World.
Les Murailles de Samaris (1983) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the first of the stories which explores the world of Les Cités Obscures, a “counter-Earth” on the opposite side of our Sun with a continent of separate city-states, each with their own distinct architectural style. Having discovered these stories first in [...]

Posted in {architecture}, {art nouveau}, {art}, {books}, {borges}, {cities}, {comics}, {fantasy}, {illustrators} | 1 comment »

 


The art of François Schuiten

Paris au XXieme Siecle by Jules Verne (1994).
Following a comment I made last week in the post about the Temples of Future Religions by François Garas, I’ve decided it’s time to give some proper attention to one of my favourite comic artists, François Schuiten, a Belgian whose obsession with imaginary architecture resembles the earlier endeavours [...]

Posted in {architecture}, {art}, {books}, {cities}, {comics}, {design}, {fantasy}, {illustrators}, {science fiction}, {technology} | 3 comments »

 


Temples for Future Religions by François Garas

Temple à la Pensée, dédié à Beethoven, vue en cours de construction (1897).
Another artist discovered whilst searching for something quite unrelated. The Musée d’Orsay are custodians of this drawing by François Garas (1866–1925), and they also have the most substantial appraisal of his career.
François Garas remains a mysterious architect, whose artistic pantheon included Baudelaire and [...]

Posted in {architecture}, {art}, {design}, {fantasy}, {religion} | 6 comments »

 


Outer Alliance Pride Day

Today is Outer Alliance Pride Day so let’s begin with a statement:
As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.
Various members of the Outer [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {burroughs}, {fantasy}, {gay}, {lovecraft}, {politics}, {science fiction}, {work} | 9 comments »

 


 





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