September 2012 – Page 5 – { feuilleton }

De Profundis

De Profundis (2012).

The title is nothing to do with Oscar Wilde’s famous epistle from prison, but then that should be obvious looking at my latest piece of tenebrous artwork. “De Profundis” means “From the depths” which in this case is applied to another piece with a Cthulhu theme. I made a decision earlier this year that my calendar design for 2013 would comprise a collection of all my Cthulhu portraits to date, from The Call of Cthulhu on. I didn’t have 12 pictures, however, so I’m currently making up the numbers between other jobs. This is the first completed piece which steals a background from the illustrations by Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou for Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1871). The voyagers in the Nautilus encountered some fearsome creatures but nothing quite like this. I can’t say at the moment when the calendar will be ready but I’m hoping to have it finished before the end of the month.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Weekend links 125

Coronal Mass Ejection from the surface of the Sun, August 31st, 2012.

• “Most of the main parts were recorded in a single day using Vangelis’s famous technique: try to play as many synths as possible at once.” Simon Drax on the prolific musical output of Zali Krishna. The new Krishna opus is Bremsstrahlung Sommerwind, free to download at the Internet Archive.

• The Northants International Comics Expo (N.I.C.E.) opens on September 22nd. Among the many attendees there will be Mr Alan Moore making his first convention appearance since 1987.

• “Isolated for one night in a boat overlooking the Thames, Geoff Dyer explores representations of reality through the lens of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”

Now seems the right time to revisit this secret archive of public broadcasting. It’s an antidote to the celebrity-led, format-driven nature of so many arts documentaries made today. It shows that it’s possible to produce TV that is both populist and experimental. And it also refutes the cliché that the 1970s was a decade only of crisis and downturn. “Feminism, political theatre, Ways of Seeing: I wasn’t thinking, ‘what a terrible time’. It was very dynamic, activist, political. Creatively it was very exciting. Yet all they show on those television retrospectives are episodes of Top of the Pops.”

Sukhdev Sandhu talks to Mike Dibb, the director of Ways of Seeing.

• From 1999: Colm Tóibín reviews A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition by Gregory Woods.

• What We See: a song by Julia Holter & Nite Jewel with a film by Delaney Bishop & Jose Wolff.

• Rick Poynor on The crash test dummy: from subcultural fringes to pop culture mainstream.

In his 1973 book on Joyce, Joysprick, Burgess made a provocative distinction between what he calls the “A” novelist and the “B” novelist: the A novelist is interested in plot, character and psychological insight, whereas the B novelist is interested, above all, in the play of words. The most famous B novel is Finnegans Wake, which Nabokov aptly described as “a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room.” The B novel, as a genre, is now utterly defunct; and A Clockwork Orange may be its only long-term survivor.

Martin Amis on A Clockwork Orange, fifty years on. My old post about the film’s record shop scene continues to be one of the most popular pages here.

• Wild Boys: David Bowie and William Burroughs in 1974, hand-coloured by DB.

• Alfred Kubin‘s illustrations for Haschisch (1902) by Oscar AH Schmitz.

• Revolution off: industrial ruins photographed by Thomas Jorion.

• Tetrahedra of Space: 22 pulp illustrations by Frank R. Paul.

• The Blue Boy Studiolo: a Tumblr.

• Marina Warner visits Hell.

• The art of Casey Weldon.

• RainyMood.com

• Third Stone From The Sun (1967) by The Jimi Hendrix Experience | Sunrise In The Third System (1971) by Tangerine Dream | 3rd From The Sun (1982) by Chrome.

Three stages of Icarus

Daedalus and Icarus (1615–1625) by Anthony van Dyck.

The story of the doomed youth as seen via the few Icarus works at the Google Art Project. Brueghel’s famous painting is absent, unfortunately, so I won’t quote the equally famous lines by Auden either. Van Dyck gives us a golden-haired twink that Auden might approve of although I seem to recall the poet preferred rougher trade. No indication as to how those wings are supposed to function when they don’t seem to be attached to anything. The father points ominously skyward while the boy already knows where he’s headed.

Icarus (1655) by Artus Quellinus.

Artus Quellinus was a Flemish sculptor whose work is a deliberate harking back to Classical antecedents.

The Lament for Icarus (1898) by Herbert Draper.

Herbert Draper has been dismissed for years as a late-Victorian kitsch-monger, far too academic to be worthy of consideration. Since I often feel an affection for anything that upsets art critics I rather like his brand of fin-de-siècle soft porn. Many artists of the period at least varied their output often enough to avoid accusations of unseemly interests. Not so Draper, whose oeuvre runs the gamut of wet mythological females: naiads, sirens, kelpies, mermaids, etc. Even with dead Icarus as a subject he has to throw in a naiad or three. Van Dyck’s twink has transmuted here into a muscular hunk; he’d need to be strong to wield those colossal wings. Interesting to see from the study below that the figure was developed considerably from the original model. The study is also a better piece of draughtsmanship than the painting where the right arm seems wrong somehow, and the legs appear to be melting down the rock on which he’s beached. Barry Windsor Smith produced a variation on the theme in the 1980s that may have been inspired by the Draper, something he called Self-Portrait with Wings.

Study for Icarus (1898) by Herbert Draper.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The end of Orpheus

Skull, 1983

Mention yesterday of pencil drawing prompted me to dig out this item from one of my old portfolios. It was drawn shortly after I was given a somewhat battered human skull by a student nurse (hello, Victoria, wherever you are), an object I sketched on a number of occasions before eventually making it into the finger-slashing fetish object below which appeared recently in the The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. The drawing dates from 1983—I remember listening to the Art of Noise EP Into Battle whilst working—and it’s unusual for me in showing the drawn object alone on a sheet of paper with no attempt made to place it in a scene. It’s also a slightly misjudged rendering; this ink drawing from a year later shows a more careful representation of the skull’s proportions, spoiled a little by the pointless and unconvincing seascape I placed behind it.

The art of Michael Leonard

Against the Glass.

British artist Michael Leonard received a passing mention here some time ago for his work as an illustrator in the 1970s. Since that time he’s concentrated on establishing himself as a portraitist of considerable repute, with a painting of the Queen and Spark the Corgi hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. These fantastic pencil drawings show a more homoerotic side of his work, part of a large series of nude (or near-nude) studies in which beautiful men (and also a number of women) are perfectly rendered. I’ve always liked pure pencil drawing, the challenges of doing it to this standard are considerable, as are the pleasures of seeing such a successful application of the simplest of media. The compositions work really well, tight and often cropped to concentrate the attention. Leonard applies a similar approach in his paintings, some of which replicate or echo the pencil works. I prefer the pencils but then I have a predilection for monochome art. You can judge his paintings for yourself here.

Twisting Torsos.

On the Steps.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive