A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Art
If the Devil has all the best tunes he may as well have the chocolate to go with them. I was hoping there might be more examples of this brand but it seems not. Details about the designs are also scant but Fausta was a product of the Maison Prouvost Motte chocolaterie in Tourcoing, France. This invoice shows they were still using a version of the poster below as a company logo in the 1940s.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Paul Konewka’s Faust
• Magicians
Work-related research this week had me wondering who it was that first thought of turning Battersea Power Station into a table. For the past few days I’ve been looking at a lot of the illustration work that George Hardie produced for the Hipgnosis album covers in the 70s and 80s; I’ll explain why in due course but the quest led me to seek out the songbook for Pink Floyd’s Animals album, two pages of which can be seen in the first Hipgnosis book.
Hipgnosis would often extend their album design into promotional areas, producing related posters, stickers, and so on. Pink Floyd’s popularity meant there was demand for songbooks, and the one for Animals is a treat for the use it makes of additional photos from the flying-pig sessions at Battersea Power Station. The idea of using the power station for the cover came from Roger Waters, incidentally; a shame he didn’t apply the same invention to his lyrics. But I digress…
From the Animals songbook (1977). By George Hardie?
Between the photos (and, er, the songs) there are several pages of graphics by (I’m guessing) Bush Hollyhead and George Hardie; the former depicts a pig, dog and sheep in various stylised arrangements while Hardie provided a vignette of bacon rashers on a Battersea table. This was 1977 so I’m assuming it’s the earliest example of the power-station-as-table, unless, of course, somebody out there knows better.
When the Monster Dies (1990) by Kate Pullinger. Illustration by Willie Ryan.
And sure enough… Thanks to herr doktor bimler for suggesting this one.
Robber Baron Table (2006) by Studio Job.
Artist David Mach took up the table idea in the 1990s to produce a series of collages showing an enormous chimney-legged chair sitting beside the power station. There’s no explanation as to why the table should be upside down but then artists often don’t think things through as well as designers. A better idea is the Battersea-like Robber Baron Table (2006) by Studio Job, part of a series of furniture concepts suitable for oligarchs and those who work in the City of London.
And so to the inevitable, one of a number of stylish tables currently being manufactured by the Battersea Table company.
Not a table but another clever repurposing of Giles Gilbert Scott’s architecture. Atypyk makes concrete ashtrays for those who still smoke, with the chimneys formed from unsmoked cigarettes. Battersea Power Station when it was in use did much to contribute to London’s polluted air so this seems a fitting by-product. Are there any more examples out there?
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus 16: Prisms
• Labels
• Storm Thorgerson, 1944–2013
• Hipgnosis turkeys
• Peter Christopherson, 1955–2010
• Storm Thorgerson: Right But Wrong
• Battersea Power Station
Mirages (1919) is a book of poems by Renée de Brimont with illustrations by George Barbier, an artist whose work has featured here on several occasions. This is a minor addition to the Barbier oeuvre with fewer illustrations than I would have hoped for, a handful of designs that show a different style to his more familiar pochoir prints. Many illustrators vary their styles—even Beardsley did—but Barbier seemed happy maintaining a single drawing style. (Note: The copy of this book at the Internet Archive is missing the cover picture above.)
Time for another work update. These are three covers for fantasy novels from LGB imprints due for release in the next week or so. The brief for Eric Arvin’s cover was walking house plus some kind of fairground (or carnival) decoration. I found a nice trove of fairground art at Sheffield University but the picture was working so well I didn’t want to clutter it with extraneous detail. Wave Goodbye to Charlie is published by Wilde City Press.
And speaking of extraneous detail… Ginn Hale’s books continue a series featuring swashbuckling, shapeshifting characters, witches and the like. (There’s also a witch in Eric Arvin’s novel but she drives a Buick.) I spent a great deal of time collaging bits of gargoyles and statuary from A. Raguenet’s six-volume Materials and Documents of Architecture and Sculpture (1915) into two elaborate arch designs…then covered them over. This is a bad habit but at least everything ended up in the finished artwork. My other bad habit is spending ages creating something only to place it into the composition and find it doesn’t work at all… Ginn Hale’s novels are published by Blind Eye Books.
A Follower by Jason Grim.
• Haunted Futures, a multi-genre anthology from Ghostwoods Books, will feature stories by Warren Ellis, John Reppion, Liesel Schwarz, Chuck Wendig, Richard Kadrey, Stephen Blackmoore and others. It will also feature some of my illustrations but only if this this Kickstarter fund is successful.
• “…at issue here is restriction versus potential: protect a specific set of choices versus open the field to the exploration of everything.” Sam Potts offers a refutation of Robert Bringhurst’s design textbook The Elements of Typographic Style.
• “I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.” Morgan Meis quoting David Lynch in a review of David Lynch: The Unified Field, a new exhibition of Lynch’s paintings.
But among these novels only Moravagine, first discovered for English-speaking readers by Henry Miller and a direct ancestor of Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, has survived as an underground classic. A monstrous admixture of Lautréamont’s Maldoror, Feuillade’s Fantômas, Nietzsche’s Superman, Jack the Ripper and (according to the Cendrars scholar Jay Bochner) the deranged Jung and Freud disciple Otto Gross, Moravagine remains Cendrars’s most nihilistic and darkly comic other.
Richard Sieburth on Blaise Cendrars and his “Dada update of Dostoevsky”, coincidentally the subject of a post here earlier in the week.
• “…the duchess became enthralled with the idea of creating a garden of plants that could kill instead of heal.” Natasha Geiling on Jane Percy’s Poison Garden.
• Mix of the week: Kosmik Elektronik [part 3] by The Kosmische Club. More Kosmische musik: Agitation Free on French television in 1973.
• At Dangerous Minds: Secret Weapons (1972), 22 minutes of made-for-TV dystopian science fiction directed by David Cronenberg.
• Project Praeterlimina, “a journal of daemonology, magic, and the human condition”.
• The NOS Project: download Shed’s score for Murnau’s Nosferatu.
• At Lambda Literary: Toy, a poem by Evan J. Peterson.
• Drew Daniel doesn’t want to play the listicle game.
• Haunted Island (1973) by Agitation Free | Haunted Heights (1977) by Peter Baumann | Haunted Dancehall (1994) by The Sabres of Paradise