John – Page 907 – { feuilleton }

New things for November II

It’s always nice when something you’ve worked on turns up in the post and there’s been a double helping of that this week with the arrival of the Chaoticum CD and the catalogue for the Maison D’Ailleurs exhibition. Since both of these are either partly or wholly connected to HP Lovecraft, their simultaneous arrival is fitting.

The CD is a digipak on textured art paper and another quality production from Horus CyclicDaemon. The exhibition catalogue manifested as a small hardback book which was a pleasant surprise, with the skull maze design blocked in silver on the cover. Each artist is allotted a single page and the book also includes some original fiction based on Lovecraft’s story notes by a number of well-known writers. My picture is rather shrunken the way it’s positioned across the centre of a page (would have been better running vertically) but then it was my decision to make it so wide in the first place.

The Chaoticum CD is limited to 500 copies and can be ordered here. The catalogue is available from Maison D’Ailleurs or the Payot Libraire bookstore for CHF 37.00 + p&p (or 38, depending on which page you look at).

Also arriving this week is my illustration of ex-Sun City Girls guitarist Sir Richard Bishop for an Arthur Magazine interview by Erik Davis. Arthur #27 will be hitting the stands in the US and Canada shortly but for now you can download it in PDF form here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lovecraftian horror at Maison d’Ailleurs
• New things for October

William Burroughs gives thanks again

I posted the text of William Burroughs’ Thanksgiving Prayer last year as there wasn’t a copy of Gus Van Sant’s film version available anywhere. YouTube has now filled that gap.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William Burroughs gives thanks
• The Final Academy
• William Burroughs book covers
• Towers Open Fire

Mad about the boy

Mad about the boy
| The Ancient Greeks having a gay old time.

Les Demi Dieux revisited

Watching the Kenneth Anger DVDs last week (which really are superb, by the way, and should be on the Christmas shopping lists of anyone interested in underground cinema) had me hunting around for more of the kind of period imagery one sees in his Scorpio Rising (1964) and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), imagery that’s erotic if seen with the correct eye (a gay one, naturally). The photos produced by Les Demi Dieux, a New York photographer of the Fifties and Sixties, correspond very much to the atmosphere in Anger’s films, not least because of the location, Scorpio Rising being filmed among the biker groups of Coney Island. I linked to a Flickr page showing some of these photos in March and since then this page has surfaced which sheds a bit more light on the still elusive history of these pictures.

• Les Demi Dieux at Big Kugels

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Les Demi Dieux
• James Bidgood
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally

Visions and the art of Nick Hyde

Cover painting: Holy Grove by Gage Taylor (1975).

Book purchase of the week was this American collection of what we have to call “hippy art” (or “California Visionary Art”, as its creators preferred) published by Pomegranate Publications in 1977. I’d seen this circa 1979 and many of the pictures inside were used by Omni Magazine to decorate the science fiction stories in their early issues. After that it vanished from view completely which leads me to believe that UK distributors Big O didn’t sell as many as they would have liked. The white cover design made me remember it for a long time as being part of the David Larkin series which I discussed in May but it isn’t, although the Larkin books were quite probably the model for the book’s presentation.

Finally acquiring a copy was something of a disappointment since it transpires I remembered the decent painters and forgot the terrible ones who comprise at least half the book. Cliff McReynolds is one of the better artists (Omni thought so too) and by coincidence I posted one of his Visions paintings, Landscape with Grenade, almost a year ago to the day.

BethAnn (1970).

Best of the bunch for me is Nick Hyde whose fantastically detailed works blend the fractal filigree of psychedelic art with the kind of dreamscapes and tableaux one sees in Surrealism. The print reproductions do little justice to his detail and the web degrades his work even further (see Abraxas for a good example). Happily there are posters available.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive