John – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 838

Amethyst geode by Sheila Sund.

• RIP Tony Rayns: A Supreme Cinephile Remembered – notes and observations by Geoff Andrew. The remembrance mentions Rayns’ Cinema Rising, a short-lived magazine he was editing in the 1970s. I posted an extract from the first issue here.

• The week in photo competitions: Hasselblad Masters 2026; ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2026 shortlist; International Aerial Photographer of the Year.

• At Colossal: Veks Van Hillik suspends fish, insects, and other objects in surreal murals.

• New music: The Crystal Suite by Paul Schütze; Vestiges by Olivier Alary.

• At AnOther: Inside James Turrell’s most ambitious Skyspace to date.

• Off With His Head: A short story by David Rudkin.

• The Cosmic Dope

• The Crystal Ship (1967) by The Doors | Among Fields Of Crystal (1980) by Harold Budd / Brian Eno | Crystal Clear (1992) by The Grid

Phantom Canyon, a film by Stacey Steers

Phantom Canyon (2006) is another short animated film by Stacey Steers where many of the backgrounds and other details are collaged pieces from old engravings. There are so many of these films by Steers and older directors like Lawrence Jordan that I’m starting to think they should be considered a sub-genre inside the general body of film animation, just as engraving collage is almost a separate class of paper collage.

In Stacey Steers’ The Edge of Alchemy the human character was animated from repurposed footage of Janet Gaynor and Mary Pickford. For this earlier film the humans have been borrowed from Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering motion studies. Muybridge is popular with animators for the obvious reason that his photographs were early forms of film animation (or cinema) in themselves; his photo experiments are even the subject of at least two animated films: Le Cheval de Fer (1984) by Gérald Frydman, and Muybridge’s Strings (2011) by Koji Yamamura. In Phantom Canyon a Muybridge woman travels through a surreal landscape where she’s assailed continually by monstrous insects and other objects while being pursued by a bat-winged Muybridge man. “A true story” says a subtitle, but it’s left to us to decide how much this may be metaphorical.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Cosmic Alchemy, a film by Lawrence Jordan
• Edge of Alchemy, a film by Stacey Steers
• Still Life, a film by Connor Griffith
• Hamfat Asar, a film by Lawrence Jordan
• Carabosse, a film by Lawrence Jordan
• Labirynt by Jan Lenica
• Heaven and Earth Magic by Harry Smith

The art of Katsuyuki Nishijima

The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kiso Kaidō is a ukiyo-e print series by Keisai Eisen and Utagawa Hiroshige depicting notable places on one of the main roads leading from Edo (Tokyo) to Kyoto. A modern-day version of the series by Katsuyuki Nishijima follows a similar route (as much as it still exists) showing some of the old buildings seen along the way.

Nishijima’s prints have heavier lines than you find in their 19th-century equivalents but few of his scenes look immediately contemporary. In these and other prints he favours architectural views or details: thatched farmhouses, inns and shops, most of which are traditional timber buildings. What you don’t see in his prints of villages is recent buildings or even modern details like the electricity lines that follow Japanese roads. The Kiso Kaidō series is unusual for including a pre-war brick building, one of a handful still standing in Tokyo’s Nihonbashi district. People are also absent from these scenes. Hiroshige’s views of the Kiso Kaidō all feature groups of travellers but in Nishijima’s pictures any human activity is taking place out of our sight.

• Nishijima at Ukiyo-e.org

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Weekend links 837

Tree Shadows on the Park Wall, Roundhay, Leeds (1872) by John Atkinson Grimshaw.

• “In many cases, the rules of physics that apply in a real scene appear to be optional in a painting; they can be obeyed or ignored at the discretion of the artist to enhance the painting’s intended effect.” An extract from The Visual World of Shadows by Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh, in which the authors examine some of the rule-breaking that takes place when artists are dealing with shadows in paintings. I mentioned this aspect of artistic licence in a recent interview, making the point that meticulously accurate light and shade is a tell-tale sign of AI art.

• Orson Welles’ unfinished film of Don Quixote is back in the news again. Welles spent twenty years shooting scenes when he had the time and the money, and I seem to have spent an equivalent time reading about attempts to release the film. Any assembled footage will lack Welles’ bravura editing but I’d still like to see it.

• Read an extract from Still In A Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers And The Reinvention Of Rock, 1984–994 by Simon Reynolds.

• Mixes of the week: King Tubby – The Heaviest Dubs – A DJ Mix by Mista Savona, and Bleep Mix #319 by Yu Su.

• “What makes music psychedelic?” James McKeown on the music of Terry Riley.

• At the BFI: Gayle Sequeira selects 10 great films about dinner parties.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Loopy.

• The Strange World of…King Tubby.

• Shadows (1967) by The Leather Boy | The Never-Deserting Shadow (1991) by Jarboe | Moon Shadows (2001) by Laraaji

Gargoyles, Chimeres, and the Grotesque in French Gothic Sculpture

Good books about gargoyles aren’t easy to find but this one, edited by Lester Burbank Bridaham, is better than many I’ve seen. Gargoyles, Chimeres, and the Grotesque in French Gothic Sculpture was published in 1930, and is mostly a collection of photographs, with the text kept to a minimum at the front of the book. The nature of the subject—eroded soot-stained sculptures seen against eroded soot-stained walls—doesn’t always help the photographer but the book makes up in quantity what it lacks in quality. There are many photographs here, often four to a page over 200 pages. Dover reprinted the book in a large-format edition in 2006.

These gargoyles and grotesques show very plainly the complete freedom under which the old craftsmen worked and the immense originality and variety that were the result. Here are hundreds of spontaneous creations, each as individual as possible, and not only this but many of them show a brilliancy of space composition and a fineness of line that would not shame a great sculptor. Craftsmen these, but also creative artists.

Ralph Adams Cram in the introduction

The authors divide their study according to subject: Last Judgments, Gargoyles of different ages, Chimeras (or hybrid creatures), and Heads. Gargoyles are often hybrid creatures, of course, but the broad difference between a gargoyle and a chimera in the architectural sense would be that gargoyles often serve a purpose as a waterspout whereas chimeras are solely decorative. Gargoyles are a good example of an architectural solution that evolved into an element of architectural style. Spouts were required to direct rainwater away from the lower areas of the building; decoration helped incorporate the spouts into the building’s structure then the decoration became a traditional part of the Gothic style. For a time, anyway. You don’t see many gargoyles among the buildings designed by the rather pious English revivalists in the 19th century, but the great French revivalist and restorer, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, enjoyed the grotesquery of the old cathedrals, and it’s he who was responsible for the famous chimeras that look down on Paris from the balconies of Notre Dame.

Continue reading “Gargoyles, Chimeres, and the Grotesque in French Gothic Sculpture”