{art} – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 839

Imaginary Numbers (1954) by Yves Tanguy.

• “In all his writing, Ballard seems to embrace the opposed extremes of pulp genre conventions on the one hand and avant-garde experimentation on the other, while entirely rejecting the norms of conventional literary fiction that lie between these two extremes.” Steven Shaviro reviewing The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of JG Ballard by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan.

• The Naturalist’s Library: A complete digital edition of William Jardine’s 40-volume series on natural history published 1833–1843.

• New music: Cooked by Oren Ambarchi; Where Light Pauses In The Silence Of The Sun by Abul Mogard / Rafael Anton Irisarri.

• Richard Dadd: the painter whose fantastical vision was unconfined by his 43 years in an asylum.

• At Colossal: “Trompe-l’œil paintings by Jason Limon reveal a hidden skeletal world.”

• “Adam Rowe is writing a new book about science fiction art.”

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – July 2026 at Ambientblog.

• RIP Sam Neill.

• Curationist

• The Skeleton And The Roundabout (1968) by The Idle Race | Skeletal Framework (1981) by Eyeless In Gaza | Skeletal Remains (2002) by Bohren & Der Club Of Gore

The 7 Spectral Perils of Dorothea Tanning

I like a picture series, and this is one I hadn’t encountered before. Dorothea Tanning’s Les 7 périls spectraux (1950) is a portfolio of seven lithograph prints with accompanying text, “Pourquoi Rester Muets?”, by André Pieyre de Mandiargues. Of the series, the artist had this to say:

My first lithograph adventure has become a book. An album with seven perils in it. Because to the seven deadly sins I preferred the seven spectral perils, life being more perilous than sinful.

What we don’t have—or I’ve been unable to find—is a list of perils to go with their respective prints. I’d guess, therefore, that with the perils being replacements for sins there’s a correspondence with the traditional prescriptive list, although this still leaves us to guess which is which. The print that shows a sunflower framed by a knife and fork may be allied to gluttony or it may refer to something entirely different, sunflowers being a recurrent, often enigmatic, feature of Tanning’s paintings.

First Peril.

There’s a further correspondence with Une Semaine de Bonté, the collage novel created by Tanning’s husband, Max Ernst, in the 1930s. Ernst’s “Week of Kindness” comprises seven days, each of which is assigned a “capital element”, only in Ernst’s scheme we have a definite list of elements: mud, water, fire, blood, blackness, sight, and “unknown”. Since Tanning’s perils may also refer to a private mythology we’ll have to assign them to “unknown” as well, unless further information comes to light.

Second Peril.

Third Peril.

Fourth Peril.

Fifth Peril.

Sixth Peril.

Seventh Peril.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Temptations
• 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements
• Max and Dorothea
• Dorothea Tanning, 1910–2012
• Dorothea Tanning: Early Designs for the Stage

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

Continue reading “The art of Katsuyuki Nishijima”