A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Art
The Charles Perrault fairy tale given an Arts and Crafts interpretation by British artist Joseph Southall (1861–1944). This is a slim volume from 1895 with illustrations very much in the manner of Walter Crane’s work for William Morris. As with all such stories from the Victorian era, the grim nature of the tale is buried under a profusion of ornament and painstaking detail. Browse the rest of the book here or download it here.
More from Ezio Anichini (1886–1948), the Italian artist responsible for yesterday’s Salomé, these are part of a series of postcards on the theme of sacred music dated from between 1915 to 1920. The precision of these drawings is remarkable. See the (complete?) set here.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ezio Anichini’s Salomé
Scena Illustrata was an Italian magazine that continued to fly the flag for Art Nouveau into the 1920s, by which time the style’s organic flourishes were looking old-fashioned when compared to the rectilinear forms of early Art Deco. This cover is from 1921 but could easily have appeared any time in the past two decades. Ezio Anichini (1886–1948) was a regular illustrator for the magazine. Searching for more of his work I realised I’d seen several of his covers before without having known his name. His Salomé looks more like something by Léon Bakst than anything from the Middle East, while that impossible reversal of the dancer’s head adds something we haven’t seen before. Steven Heller wrote a short appraisal of the artist’s career last year. There’s a lot more from Scena Illustrata on this Marinni page. (Via Beautiful Century again.)
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive
Elektrik Karousel, a new release on the Ghost Box label by The Focus Group. “For a clue to its moods, think Czech animation, Italian Giallo, early Radiophonics, HP Lovecraft stories, 1960s underground cinema, Lewis Carroll and baroque psych.” Julian House’s package design is “heavily inspired by 1960s underground press and conceived as a kind of mind altering DIY board game”.
• Joseph Stannard of The Outer Church compiles a mix for Kit Records, and talks about rural psychedelia and malevolent lighthouses, among other things.
• At Sci-Fi-O-Rama: a sampling of Dan Nadel & Norman Hathaway’s Electrical Banana – Masters of Psychedelic Art (2012).
• Stranger than Paradise: Tilda Swinton photographed by Tim Walker in the Surrealist Wonderland of Las Pozas, Mexico.
• Whistler in Limehouse & Wapping: stunning etchings by the 25-year-old artist when he was newly arrived in London.
• The complete catalogue of Sunn O))) recordings is now on Bandcamp for preview and purchase.
• La Danza de la Realidad: Alejandro Jodorowsky returns to his childhood in Tocopilla, Chile.
• Enjoy The Silence: Jude Rogers talks to Michael Rother about joy of quiet.
• Dressing the Air, “the Bureau of Sensory Intelligence”, had a relaunch.
• Fast forward – and press play again: Cassettes are back
• The Lovecraft Expert: An Interview with S.T. Joshi
• Book Graphics: an illustration blog.
• Paint Box (1967) by Pink Floyd | Beat Box (1984) by Art of Noise | Glory Box (1994) by Portishead
Philippe Lemaire is French, and another engraving collage artist who I’d have to include in the list of post-Ernst practitioners if I ever get round to updating my Strange Attractor essay about Wilfried Sätty. Like Ernst and Sätty, Lemaire seems to use paper-and-scissors techniques, although Sätty also made use of print processes in order to duplicate the images he cut from old books, and also resize, flip or invert them. In this he’s the bridge between the original method of engraving collage and digital techniques.
The examples here are from a small series of Tarot images on the artist’s website, none of which are labelled so we’re left to guess the identity of what I presume are figures from the Major Arcana. The one above may be The Empress but the other two resist easy interpretation. Judge the others for yourself here.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tarotism and Fergus Hall
• Giger’s Tarot
• The Occult Explosion
• Wilfried Sätty album covers
• Nature Boy: Jesper Ryom and Wilfried Sätty
• Wilfried Sätty: Artist of the occult
• Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty
• The Major Arcana by Jak Flash
• The art of Pamela Colman Smith, 1878–1951
• The Major Arcana