{ feuilleton }

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 [...]

Mother West Wind (1918).
The first thought which comes to mind when looking at these beautiful prints is to wonder why American artist Bertha Lum isn’t more well-known, she had a particularly fondness for fluid lines and swirling arabesques as in the example above. There is at least a wealth of detail about her career online, [...]

Chat Noir poster (1896).
We had Louis Wain yesterday so it only seems right to follow with the other notable cat artist of the period, and also the one whose work I prefer, Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (1859–1923).
Steinlen’s designs for the Montmartre cabaret, Le Chat Noir, of which there are many variations, are dismayingly ubiquitous in contemporary [...]

The Mother of Triplets.
Anyone in the vicinity of Nunnington Hall in North Yorkshire over the next month has the opportunity to view and—if you’re wealthy enough—buy some pictures by Victorian cat artist Louis Wain (1860–1939). Wain is famously “The Cat Artist Who Went Mad” (as Chris Beetles’ gallery site puts it) and that piece of [...]

An illustrated book from circa 1926 at the NYPL Digital Gallery. Art by T Hasegawa, words by Lafcadio Hearn.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• 8 out of 10 cats prefer absinthe
• Monsieur Chat

Or the temptations of Uncle Sam… An editorial cartoon from 1919 by Oliver Herford (1863–1935) showing how the nonsense argument of “X leads to Y” goes back a long way. These imps are more silly than frightening, Herford should have used this as the starting point for a comic strip: Rum Demon and the Narcotics.
Previously [...]

left: Serpentine pattern; right: Bouquet pattern, both 19th c.
Regular readers here will have seen a number of posts recently concerning psychedelic culture, a perennial fascination/obsession of mine. One of the notable qualities of movements such as psychedelia or Surrealism is the way they highlight what seem to be previous manifestations of themselves which, until their [...]

An Austin Spare pastel (?), Astral Body and Ghost, from the collection of Cyclobe’s Ossian Brown adorns the label of this edition of Absinthe Brevans. Would the artist approve? Do we have to ask? He spent much of his life haunting pubs and I’d be very surprised if he hadn’t tried absinthe when he was [...]

The classic absinthe poster from 1896 by T Privat-Livemont (1861–1936), one of the best exponents of the post-Mucha style. Don’t let anyone tell you that using unclad women’s bodies in advertising is a new thing.

And a couple more Mucha-esque examples circa 1900, both credited to “Nover”, from the wide selection of absinthe graphics at the [...]

Albert Hofmann by Alex Grey.
Albert Hofmann, discoverer of LSD, 102 years old today. Last month Scientific American reported that hallucinogenic drugs are once again being considered as a way to treat psychiatric disorders.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of LSD
• The trip goes on
• Albert Hofmann
• Hep cats

Previous posts about illustrators.

• Dalí in Wonderland

• The Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest

• Der Orchideengarten illustrated

• Equus and the Executionist

• Mervyn Peake at Maison d’Ailleurs

• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

• The art of Raphaël Freida

• The art of Bertha Lum, 1869–1954

• The art of George Barbier, 1882–1932

• The art of Warwick Goble, 1862–1943

• Steinlen’s cats

• [...]

More pulp madness as Mario Bava’s 1968 crime caper finally appears on DVD in the UK this week, a camp confection from an already very camp decade, although it pales beside the lurid excesses of Barbarella which was released in the same year. Both films were based on popular European comic strips, and both are [...]

Not art inspired by LSD but drawings done whilst under its influence.
These 9 drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD—part of a test conducted by the US government during its dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950s. The artist was given a dose of LSD-25 and free access to an [...]

“Freak out baby, the bee is coming!”
The L.S. Bumble Bee, a single by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Decca F 12551, February 1967. Mistakenly included on some Beatles bootlegs in the Seventies, about which Dudley Moore commented:
Regarding The L.S. Bumble Bee, Peter Cook and I recorded that song about the time when there was so [...]

Well they would, wouldn’t they?
More great absinthe posters here.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Monsieur Chat

Ballard-for-kids from Lion (1970).
I was never a great hoarder of comics when I was a child, I usually read them then threw them away, so for years I’ve had peculiar half-memories of stories that thrilled me when I was 10-years old but whose titles I’ve invariably forgotten. The web, of course, serves to immediately [...]

A San Francisco mathematician takes a trip on LSD with his cat,
who is on the drug too. He does this every other week.
From ‘LSD: The Exploding Threat of the Mind Drug that Got Out of Control‘,
Life magazine, March 25, 1966.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• German opium smokers, 1900

It’s the same every year, the weather gets hot (30C today) and out come the Main CDs, although the march of progress has meant importing them into iTunes this time round. For some reason Main’s Hz collection (6 EPs, later a double-disc set) is especially suited to warm temperatures, partly due to remembrance of them [...]

This year sees the 20th anniversary of the publication of Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. This landmark comic book, one of the few to deserve the designation “graphic novel”, remains a particular favourite of mine, and one that still excites today for its consummate command of the comics medium. The following is a [...]

The BBC’s Great British Design Quest has reached a shortlist of ten:
1) Catseyes. Hmm, more of an invention to me but the brief here seems to be pretty broad.
2) Concorde. Can’t imagine this winning seeing as it’s generally regarded as a costly failure. In design terms though, it was a great-looking plane.
3) Grand Theft Auto. [...]