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The art of Michael Leonard

Against the Glass.

British artist Michael Leonard received a passing mention here some time ago for his work as an illustrator in the 1970s. Since that time he’s concentrated on establishing himself as a portraitist of considerable repute, with a painting of the Queen and Spark the Corgi hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. These fantastic pencil drawings show a more homoerotic side of his work, part of a large series of nude (or near-nude) studies in which beautiful men (and also a number of women) are perfectly rendered. I’ve always liked pure pencil drawing, the challenges of doing it to this standard are considerable, as are the pleasures of seeing such a successful application of the simplest of media. The compositions work really well, tight and often cropped to concentrate the attention. Leonard applies a similar approach in his paintings, some of which replicate or echo the pencil works. I prefer the pencils but then I have a predilection for monochome art. You can judge his paintings for yourself here.

Twisting Torsos.

On the Steps.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Patrick Procktor, Art and Life

Nasturtiums, Wusih (1980) by Patrick Procktor.

Ian Massey was in touch last week to alert me to Patrick Procktor, Art and Life, an exhibition of Patrick Procktor’s art he’s curated at the Huddersfield Art Gallery in Yorkshire:

Patrick Procktor was part of a bohemian circle in 1960s and 1970s London that also included his great friends the artist David Hockney and the fashion designer Ossie Clark.

The focus of this exhibition is on the artist’s paintings on canvas and works on paper, and includes portraits of quintessential Sixties figures including Derek Jarman and Jimi Hendrix, alongside topographical pictures painted in countries such as India, Italy, Egypt and China.

I really like that nasturtiums print. For those who can’t get to Huddersfield there’s Ian’s monograph of the artist, also entitled Patrick Procktor, Art and Life, which was published by Unicorn Press in 2010. The exhibition runs to 10th November, 2012.

Da Miou Mountains, Kweilin, aquatint (1980).

Update: Ian says although the nasturtiums are on the gallery website they aren’t in the show because the print was sold just beforehand. He’s sent this print from the same series. The exhibition was reviewed by Charles Darwent in The Independent on Sunday.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Gervase and Patrick

Weekend links 124

Couple with Clock Tower (2011) by Louise Despont.

Assuming such a thing doesn’t already exist, there’s a micro-thesis to be written about the associations between the musicians of Germany’s Krautrock/Kosmische music scene in the early 1970s and the directors of the New German Cinema. I’d not seen this clip before which shows the mighty Amon Düül II jamming briefly in Fassbinder’s The Niklashausen Journey, a bizarre agitprop TV movie made in 1970. More familiar is the low-budget short that Wim Wenders helped photograph a year earlier showing the Düül performing Phallus Dei. Wenders later commissioned Can to provide music for the final scene of Alice in the Cities. And this is before you get to Werner Herzog’s lengthy relationship with Popol Vuh which includes this memorable moment. Any others out there that I’ve missed?

• Album sleeves in their original locations. And speaking of album sleeves, photo prints of some very famous cover designs by Storm Thorgerson will be on display at the Public Works Gallery, Chicago, throughout September and October.

• Crazy for kittehs: the quest to find the purring heart of cat videos: Gideon Lewis-Kraus goes where few journalists dare to tread. Also at Wired, the same writer explores the Cat Cafés of Tokyo.

• The City of Rotted Names, a “shamelessly Joycian cubist fantasy” by Hal Duncan, available to read in a variety of formats on a pay-as-thou-wilt basis until Monday only.

• Jailhouse rockers: How The Prisoner inspired artists from The Beatles to Richard Hawley.

• How To Survive A Plague, a documentary about HIV/AIDS activism in the US.

• Deborah Harry: hippy girl in 1968, punk in 1976, and Giger-woman in 1981.

• Alan Garner answers readers’ questions about his new novel, Boneland.

• For steampunk aficionados: ‘COG’nitive Dreams by Dana Mattocks.

• David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Madonna & Asparagus: Kraftwerk in 1976.

• New music videos: Goddess Eyes I by Julia Holter | Sulphurdew by Ufomammut | Warm Leatherette by Laibach.

A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder

A great title. As usual I came across this whilst searching for something else. Something about this was familiar but I haven’t read the book, and I suspect it will be one of those where the title proves a lot more evocative than the narrative. The author was a Canadian writer, James De Mille (1833–1880), and this novel of all his works is the most well-known for its predating more famous fantasy novels by H. Rider Haggard. Wikipedia has a précis:

The satiric and fantastic romance is set in an imaginary semi-tropical land in Antarctica inhabited by prehistoric monsters and a cult of death-worshipers called the Kosekin. Begun many years before it was published, it is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and anticipates the exotic locale and fantasy-adventure elements of works of the “Lost World genre” such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot, as well as innumerable prehistoric world movies based loosely on these and other works. The title and locale were inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s Ms. Found in a Bottle.

The illustrations are by Gilbert Gaul from the story’s serialisation in Harper’s Weekly in 1888. The best one shows a ride on a huge pterodactyl-like creature called an athaleb that makes me think of the ride on the shrowk in David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, albeit without the erotic fervour of Lindsay’s episode. Fervour or no, the road to Lindsay’s philosophical weirdness begins with early novels such as this. De Mille’s book may be browsed here or downloaded here.

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Raymond Bertrand paintings

Scanning some of my work today I thought I’d follow yesterday’s post with a few scans of the colour plates in the second Eric Losfeld volume of Bertrand’s work, Dessins Erotiques II (1971). None of the pictures in the book are titled, and there’s little detail either about their production. Among the colour works is the Boschian piece above which for once doesn’t have one of the artist’s strange women as its sole subject. A few more scans from the same book can be seen at this earlier post.

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