Weekend links 30

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Did someone say “woody”? Plenty more toy antics at TheOneCam.

• And yet more Haeckelisms: Praying in Haeckel’s Garden, recent works by artist Mary O’Malley.

Seasons of the Peacock, the perennial showoff as depicted by a handful of Art Nouveau artists. A couple of examples there I hadn’t seen before.

• Dorian Cope presents On This Deity, “Commemorating culture heroes and excavating world events.”

• At long last, Fantagraphics will be publishing Ah Pook is Here, the comic strip collaboration between William Burroughs and artist Malcolm McNeill. Something to look forward to for next year. Related: Malcolm McNeill’s website.

David Lynch Dark Splendor: “Der große Filmemacher David Lynch als Fotograf, Maler, Zeichner und Grafiker.”

More on the forthcoming album from Brian Eno, Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins. With this degree of hype the end result is going to be a disappointment.

Book design by Richard Hollis, including John Berger’s essential Ways of Seeing.

A fistful of Vignellis: the work of Lella and Massimo Vignelli celebrated.

• Berni Wrightson’s Frankenstein at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

Jimi Hendrix, Philip José Farmer reader.

Imagerie du Chemin de Fer.

El UFO Cayó (2005) by Ry Cooder.

The art of Jim Leon, 1938–2002

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Psychopathia Sexualis (1967).

This, dear friends, is what the art of the fantastic could give us but rarely does, something which combines the metaphysical intensity of the Symbolists with a post-Freudian sensibility to create what Philip José Farmer once called “the pornography of the weird”. Jim Leon was a British artist whose work gained prominence via the underground magazines of the 1960s, especially Oz, although he was never really a psychedelic artist as such. Many of his earliest paintings show the influence of the Pop artists, it was only later in the decade that a distinctly original and surreal imagination came to the fore. Oz was always pretty scurrilous and had no qualms about challenging the authorities with bizarre sexual imagery which other magazines would never dare to print. Leon and other artists were fortunate to have such a public forum for outré work, a few years earlier or later and they might not have found an outlet at all.

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Untitled (1979).

His early work blended influences from Francis Bacon, surrealism and the baroque. Lurking there is also the English visionary William Blake, together with the obsessive Romanticism of the pre-Raphaelites. A number of his early paintings and drawings refer to William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (first published in Paris in 1959). These were just some of the ingredients of an amazing, semi-abstract, spatially complex, ritualistic, orgiastic flesh-painting, expressing highly wrought morbidity, eroticism, transcendence and ecstasy; astonishing explorations of the murkier depths of the human mind. (More.)

A Very English Visionary by Simon Wilson.

I first encountered Leon’s work thanks to David Britton’s curating of a portfolio feature in Wordworks magazine which was republished in the Savoy Books anthology, The Savoy Book in 1980. Having seen a Leon painting in a back issue of Oz I was surprised that an artist with such a powerful imagination was so little-known. It turns out that he’d been working all along, albeit far from the public gaze, having moved to Lyons in France where he spent the 1970s and 80s painting many canvases of mystical scenes similar to those produced by the California artists featured in the Visions book. None of his later work explores the darker realms of his earlier Psychopathia Sexualis drawings, and since it’s the early work that I prefer, that’s what’s featured here. These drawings and paintings bear comparison with the art of Raymond Bertrand but where Bertrand has had his work published in lavish book collections, we have to rake through back issues of magazines for Leon’s endeavours. Leon’s later paintings at least have a website which is maintained by his family.

Continue reading “The art of Jim Leon, 1938–2002”

Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009

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Not only Philip José Farmer but Polish poster artist Franciszek Starowieyski also died this week, something I probably wouldn’t have known had it not been for the indefatigable Jahsonic. I mentioned Starowieyski’s stunning work earlier this month since he produced the poster for Hour-Glass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has. There’s a further link to Bruno Schulz with another of his posters appearing very briefly at the beginning of Street of Crocodiles by the Brothers Quay.

• Starowieyski poster galleries I | II

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
The Hourglass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has
Czech film posters
The poster art of Richard Amsel
Bollywood posters
Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
The poster art of Bob Peak
A premonition of Premonition
Perfume: the art of scent
Metropolis posters
Film noir posters

Philip José Farmer, 1918–2009

top left: artist unknown (1969); top right: Patrick Woodroffe (1975)
bottom left: Peter Elson (1988); bottom right: artist unknown (1995)

The great science fiction writer Philip José Farmer died today. I wrote about his more excessive works back in August 2007 and that post is as good an obituary as I could offer now. A Feast Unknown remains a favourite for pushing extreme content to a degree which would give William Burroughs pause whilst still functioning as a rollicking page-turner. Few writers could work on both those levels and do much more besides. Feast seems to be out of print today, which isn’t a surprise. Publishers are still a timid bunch for the most part and Farmer never pulled his punches.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Philip José Farmer book covers