Apr 24, 2013

Philippe Lemaire is French, and another engraving collage artist who I’d have to include in the list of post-Ernst practitioners if I ever get round to updating my Strange Attractor essay about Wilfried Sätty. Like Ernst and Sätty, Lemaire seems to use paper-and-scissors techniques, although Sätty also made use of print processes in order to [...]
Feb 17, 2013

Bestia Apocalypsi (2000) by Konstantin Kalynovych. • A funding page for Better Things: The Life and Choices of Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Maria Paz Cabardo’s documentary film about the late comic artist and illustrator. • Phantasmaphile’s Pam Grossman has declared 2013 to be the Year of the Witch. • At WFMU: The Space Ghost Coast To [...]
Sep 30, 2012

Seven-inch sleeve design by Savage Pencil for Wrong Eye (1990) by Coil. • “Can you use sensory deprivation to explore ESP? And then make music from the process?” Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt of Matmos decided to find out for their new EP. Related: Occult Voices—Paranormal Music, Recordings of Unseen Intelligences, 1905–2007 at Ubuweb. Details [...]
May 6, 2012

Le Faune (1923) by Carlos Schwabe. • “When I recently attended a conference in China, many of the presenters left their papers on the cloud—Google Docs, to be specific. You know how this story ends: they got to China and there was no Google. Shit out of luck. Their cloud-based Gmail was also unavailable, as [...]
Mar 7, 2012

Maggs Bros. Ltd, London, hosts two events soon featuring { feuilleton } friends and cohorts. First up is Paul Schütze with Air Into Light, a showing of eighteen of his photo prints with musical and perfume accompaniment. Paul has been making perfume a subject of particular concern recently. The combination of sound and scent is [...]
Jan 29, 2012

One of a series of tremendous designs by Malika Favre for a new Penguin edition of the Kama Sutra. • New interviews: “…Americans — mired in individualism — prefer to think in terms of identity than in terms of roles and masks. An American would never have called a novel Confessions of a Mask.” Nicholas [...]
Dec 4, 2011

Untitled art by Katie Scott. “…the very fact that people cannot get published by the big-name publishers in the way that they used to has meant that you’ve got some really interesting and often really beautiful little small publishing houses that are springing up and coming into existence. And the stuff that they’re providing is [...]
Nov 12, 2011

Author Steve Moore discusses Somnium, his occult novel for which I provided a cover illustration, with Pádraig Ó Méalóid at the Forbidden Planet site. In addition to examining his comics work and long friendship with Alan Moore, Steve also tells us something about his novel and his lunar obsession: Without giving away too much of [...]
Oct 8, 2011

Another new piece of illustration and design. Somnium is an occult novel by Steve Moore being published this month by Strange Attractor. Some readers here may know Steve’s work as a comics writer, ex-editor of Fortean Times and also the subject of Alan Moore’s recent Unearthing text and recording. I’ve not seen the book yet [...]
Sep 25, 2011

Art by Tessa Farmer. • An exhibition of Tessa Farmer’s art is running at Viktor Wynd Fine Art, London, until October 30th. On Saturday, October 1st, Strange Attractor hosts Good Neighbours: Faeries, Folklore and the Art of Tessa Farmer also at Viktor Wynd. • Unearthing The Psychedelic Harp: “David Moats talks to harpist and songwriter [...]
Aug 13, 2011

Cover concept by Chip Kidd. I noted the imminent arrival of Gary Spencer Millidge’s labour of love last month and the volume itself turned up this week, and what a book it is, a heavyweight hardback that’s far more lavish than I anticipated. The first surprise comes when removing the dust jacket to find Alan’s [...]
Jul 4, 2011

Prospero (Heathcote Williams) and Miranda (Toyah Willcox), The Tempest (1979). The Shakespeare who spun The Tempest must have known John Dee; and perhaps through Philip Sidney he met Giordano Bruno in the year when he was writing the Cena di Ceneri—the Ash Wednesday supper in the French Ambassador’s house in the Strand. Prospero’s character and [...]
May 8, 2011

Oya by Alberto del Pozo (1945–1992). Also known as Yansa, Oya is Changó’s third wife. She is the goddess of the winds and of lightning and is mistress of the cemetery gates. Passionate and brave she fights by her husband’s side if needed. Her favorite offerings are papaya, eggplant and geraniums. From Santeria at BibliOdyssey. [...]
Feb 20, 2011

DG-2499 (1975) by the fantastic (in every sense of the word) Zdzislaw Beksinski (1929–2005). See the Dmochowski Gallery for a comprehensive collection of the artist’s work. Thanks to BibliOdyssey for the tip. • More ICA events: From Animism to Zos: Strange Attractor Salon will be “a series of weekly events, consisting of a talk and [...]
Jan 30, 2011

That essential journal of esoteric culture, Strange Attractor, announced a fourth number this week sporting a psychedelic cover which may be the work of Julian House (no credit is given on the SA site). As to the contents: From Haiti and Hong Kong to the fourth dimension and beyond: discover the secrets of madness in [...]
Oct 28, 2010

Here it is, the book that began my fascination with the collage art of Wilfried Sätty (1939–1982), a German artist and psychedelic poster designer resident in San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s. Warner Books published his Poe collection in 1976 and for some reason omit the umlaut from his name even though it’s present [...]
Oct 19, 2010

left: Magus/Lee Adams (or Magician in the Tarot) (2009); right: I Expel All Evil (2010). Tarot imagery—or work inspired by it—continues to infiltrate the contemporary art world. The gallery sites featuring Hector de Gregorio’s pictures have a couple of other portraits based on the Major Arcana but there’s no clue as to whether he’s depicted [...]
Oct 16, 2010

Forbidden in the sense that these books can’t be bought or borrowed from any library other than Borges’ Library of Babel. The designs are by Julian House and can be seen along with other work “exploring memory as trace and fragment” at the Architect’s Gallery, Teddington, UK, until 20th November. Via Belbury Parish Magazine. Elsewhere [...]
Aug 29, 2010

The Expansion of the First Great Ornamental Age: 3 Distances (2009) by Seher Shah. • Great Female Artists? Think Karachi. “One reason for the unusually high ratio of female artists in Pakistan has to do with the fact that the art industry has not traditionally been viewed as a lucrative business by men, says South [...]
Jul 17, 2010

The Fool. I’d like this photo series by young British photographer Jak Flash even if it didn’t feature attractive men; the eye candy is icing on a thaumaturgic cake. The Major Arcana takes the Trumps of the Tarot as its inspiration and manages to reinterpret the symbolism whilst retaining the hieratic nature of the traditional [...]