{ feuilleton }

First paperback edition of Titus Groan, 1968. If you’re British then, no, it isn’t what you think. Having mentioned my hometown of Blackpool yesterday there’s one detail about the town I usually regard as an annex of Hell which, if not quite a saving grace, raises it into some lesser locus of perdition. There are [...]

Illustration by Mervyn Peake for The Sphinx by Oscar Wilde (1949). The centenary of writer, artist and poet Mervyn Peake is being celebrated this year with a number of events in the UK. Mervyn Peake: A Centenary Celebration is a small exhibition of Peake’s drawings which has been running since April at the Pallant House [...]

I mentioned Harry Clarke’s stained glass work last year since Flickr now has some decent photos of Clarke’s incredible window designs. Published this month is Strangest Genius: The Stained Glass of Harry Clarke by Lucy Costigan and Michael Cullen, the first proper book-length study of the windows and other stained glass work produced by the [...]

Bellgrove, young Titus and Barquentine by Mervyn Peake. Case designed by Robert Hollingsworth. I’d thought about posting the covers of my boxed set of Gormenghast paperbacks a couple of years back when there was a flurry of blogospheric attention being given to Penguin cover designs…thought about it then never got round to it. The reason [...]

The Good Ship Ménage À Trois (2008). New York artist Joseph Cavalieri‘s stained glass work using Simpsons characters received a flurry of blogospheric attention recently. Of more interest for me is his gay-themed panels like the one above which show a different approach to the medium from that taken by Diego Tolomelli. Gormenghast (2009). And [...]

Previous posts about gay or homoerotic art or artists. A personal and idiosyncratic selection, this isn’t meant to be definitive. • The art of Naomichi Okutsu • The art of Konstantin Somov, 1869–1939 • The art of Seiji Inagaki • Claudio Bravo’s packages • Gekko Hayashi revisited • The art of George Stavrinos, 1948–1990 • [...]