{black and white} – Page 28

The art of Mark Reep

Crossing.

Artist Mark Reep sent me a link recently to his gallery of meticulous pencil and charcoal drawings which he calls “dreams in black and white”. The combination in many of these of isolated settings with minor architectural features is something I always enjoy seeing but don’t find often enough. Offhand I can think of Gérard Trignac‘s equally meticulous etchings, and Jean-Pierre Ugarte‘s paintings. Mark Reep has cards and prints of his drawings and photographs available for purchase at Bluecanvas and Redbubble.

Abandoned Waterworks.

Not All The Old Doors.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Gérard Trignac

Pamela Colman Smith’s Annancy Stories

Pamela Colman Smith’s work has appeared here before but this is an example of her early illustration I hadn’t seen until now. Annancy Stories (1899) was written and illustrated by Smith, being her own presentation of the Jamaican versions of the Anansi trickster stories. Smith’s mother was Jamaican, and the family lived in Kingston for some years before moving to New York. She was only 20 when she produced this book which is illustrated throughout with full-page plates and smaller drawings. The text is in a Jamaican patois which, as the introduction notes, would have reminded American readers of the Brer Rabbit stories. There is, of course, a shared lineage there that goes back to Africa. The drawings are in a sketchier style than the marvellous Tarot designs Smith produced for the Rider-Waite deck nearly a decade later but you can see in them the origins of her late Art Nouveau style, and also that distinctive monogram in the corner of each drawing. Annacy Stories may be browsed here or downloaded here.

Continue reading “Pamela Colman Smith’s Annancy Stories”

MMM

Post number three thousand, and searching the memory for anything which might be filed under MMM led to more occult art. Moina MacGregor Mathers (1865–1928) was the wife of Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the 1880s. Moina was the sister of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and later took to signing her illustration work “M. Bergson MacGregor”. The illustration above, however, a frontispiece for her husband’s translation of The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage (1897) was signed “M.M.M.” (The signature has been removed in this reproduction but is visible here.) That triplet of initials is typical of western occultism; when Aleister Crowley (no friend of the Mathers) was appointed head of the O.T.O. in Britain his new lodge was named Mysteria Mystica Maxima, or M.M.M.

Ms Mathers wasn’t the greatest of artists but her few works have a fin de siècle charm, and are informed by occult study which she and her husband took seriously. The example below is from yet another slim volume of mystical poetry, Poems (1897) by Golden Dawn adept Charles Rosher. No need to wonder why Max Beerbohm made Enoch Soames a poet; it often seems that those who weren’t writing poetry in the 1890s were in the minority.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Whirlpools
• The Sapphire Museum of Magic and Occultism

Atalanta Fugiens

Alchemy (1969) by the Third Ear Band. Design by Dave Loxley.

For an idea of how these posts often come into being, this one is the result of the following chain of association: an article by Leo Robson about the films of Roman Polanski > A re-viewing of Polanski’s Macbeth > A re-listening to albums by the soundtrack artists for Macbeth, British folk group the Third Ear Band > A tracking down of the famous cover image from the first Third Ear Band album.

Alchemy is the dominant theme of the first two Third Ear Band albums. The engraving used on the cover of their debut album is one of the most frequently reproduced of all images associated with this branch of occultism, one of fifty emblems from Atalanta Fugiens (1618) by the German alchemist Michael Maier (1568–1622).

The plates are by Matthäus Merian, an artist whose career produced a number of notable alchemical illustrations. A detail from one of his other oft-reproduced pieces, Macrocosm and Microcosm from the Basilica Philosophica (1618), appeared on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Saucer Full of Secrets album a year before the Third Ear Band debut. Merian would no doubt be astonished that his work was so visible to future generations even though his name is seldom mentioned at all. The popularity can be accounted for by the way the best of these images seem almost archetypal whilst being resistant to any easy interpretation. Some of Merian’s plates remind me of Magritte’s paintings; they share a tension between carefully rendered yet impossible images that imply a hidden meaning. As Borges considered metaphysics to be a branch of fantastic literature it’s possible to consider this kind of alchemical illustration as a branch of fantastic art.

A 1687 edition of Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (retitled Scrutinium Chymicum) may be browsed here or downloaded here.

Continue reading “Atalanta Fugiens”

The weekend artists, 2012

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (2012) by Lesley Barnes. She also has peacock wrapping paper.

The most popular post of the year was one I made last December featuring all the artists whose work had appeared throughout 2011 in the weekend links posts. (The surge of views occurred early in January when it was linked on Stumbleupon.) Since I’ve been away this week there aren’t any links so here’s a retrospective of things that caught my eye in 2012.

Heartsick (2011) by Kelly Durette.

Self-portrait by Jon Jacobsen from his Home series.

Der Triumph des Tintenfisches from Meggendorfer-Blätter (c. 1900). Via Beautiful Century.

Two Grove Press covers by Roy Kuhlman. From Arden Kuhlman Riordan’s Pinterest page collecting her father’s cover designs.

Technological mandala 02 (The beginning) (2012) by Leonardo Ulian.

Continue reading “The weekend artists, 2012”