May 2013 – Page 5 – { feuilleton }

I:MAGE: An Exhibition of Esoteric Artists

El Trigono de las lesiones (2010) by Cristina Francov.

I:MAGE is an exhibition of occult-inspired art which opens a week on Sunday, 19th May at the Store Street Gallery, Bloomsbury, London. As exhibitions go it’s modest in scale but with an impressive roster of contributors old and new: Agostino Arrivabene, Ithell Colquhoun, Denis Forkas Kostromitin, Steffi Grant, Orryelle, David Chaim Smith, Michael Bertiaux, Andrew Chumbley, Cristina Francov, Barry William Hale, Francesco Parisi, Austin Osman Spare, Jesse Bransford, Peter Dyde, Rik Garrett, Noko, Residue, and Michael Strum. A few examples of the work on display are shown here, some of which will be available for purchase.

The event is being organised by Fulgur Esoterica, and their website has details of some related events including John Constable’s one-man play, Spare (about artist Austin Osman Spare), a one-off performance which will be held at Treadwell’s, London, on the 24th. This catches my attention because Constable was responsible for the acclaimed theatre adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast which David Glass and company staged in the 1990s. It’s always good to find one’s favourite people joined through these lateral connections.

The Earth Magic Series (2012) by Rik Garrett.

Steffi Grant.

Demon by Denis Forkas Kostromitin.

Dream Boats and Other Stories by Dugald Stewart Walker

As is often the case, I keep intending to post various lengthy pieces but pressure of work is preventing that for the moment. So here’s another illustrated book courtesy of the Internet Archive. I linked to this in an earlier post about Walker’s work but hadn’t looked at all the illustrations until now. Dream Boats and Other Stories (1920), a collection of fairy tales, was written and illustrated by Walker, and while the prose is too twee for my jaded palette I do like his drawings. Browse the rest of the book here or download it here.

Continue reading “Dream Boats and Other Stories by Dugald Stewart Walker”

Kirlian photography

quarter3 (2006) by nebamix.

Thinking recently about the resurgence of interest in the various forms of parapsychological and occult phenomena that were so popular in the 1970s, I’m surprised not to see more mention of Kirlian photography, or the capturing of high-voltage coronal discharges on photographic plates. In the 70s the idea was that Kirlian photographs depicted auric fields, and the phenonemon was widespread enough for a while enough to attract the attention of (among others) David Bowie. From a purely aesthetic point of view I’ve always enjoyed the appearance of these photographs. Flickr has a Kirlian photography pool with a variety of examples (fewer than I’d hope) while there are more to be seen at the Full Spectrum site where they specialise in high-quality Kirlian images. While browsing the pictures you could maybe listen to Kirlian Photograph by Cabaret Voltaire, a track from their still strange and unsettling debut album, Mix-Up, itself a product of the 1970s.

A negative discharge (1896).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Thought-Forms and Auras

Ray Harryhausen, 1920–2013

Concept art for Jason and the Argonauts (1963).

He could also draw, something the obituaries won’t necessarily mention. I wasn’t aware of Ray Harryhausen’s many detailed preliminary drawings until I had the good fortune to see him give a talk at the Preston SF Group in the early 1990s. I recall mention being made of Gustave Doré as an influence, something that wasn’t so surprising given that Harryhausen’s animation career began with Willis O’Brien, animator of the original Kong. The Skull Island sets for King Kong owed much to Doré’s illustrations, and the film also made use of equally detailed preliminary drawings by O’Brien, Byron Crabbe and Mario Larrinaga.

I was going to link to Jason and company’s celebrated fight with the skeletons but the only clips on YouTube at the moment lack Bernard Herrmann’s superb score. The Harryhausen/Schneer films always had low budgets but the producers understood the importance of music, and employed Herrmann on four of their films: The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1960), Mysterious Island (1961) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Miklós Rózsa provided the score for The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) so here’s a favourite moment from that film with John Philip Law and Martin Shaw tackling Tom Baker’s sword-wielding Kali statue.

Ray Harryhausen’s production drawings can be seen in The Art of Ray Harryhausen (2005).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Swords against death

Underwater panoramas

Under Bonaire Salt Pier by Andre de Molenaar.

Who wants to go diving? A small selection from the many examples at 360Cities. There were fewer wrecks than I hoped but some of the pictures contain surprises, such as the manatee descending to investigate the camera in the Red Sea photo below.

Cape Maeda by Hitoshi Olkawa.

Olho D’Água River by Marcio Cabral.

Dugon, Red Sea by Igor Baskakov.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive