A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Art
From the Kusho series.
Having attempted a few times to photograph the motion of water in air I’m in awe of Shinichi Maruyama’s high-speed captures which make of the process a very refined and beautiful art. Japanese calligraphy and sumi-e painting are obvious precedents but the artist also refers us to Zen gardens in his Gardens series wherein flares of coloured liquid drift through abstract landscapes. See his website for more.
Salomé (1901).
Monsieur Wiley prompted this post by drawing my attention to the picture above. I’d already seen another Salomé by Gustav Adolf Mossa on this page a few days ago but resisted the temptation to mention it. A bit more searching revealed yet another Mossa rendering of the theme which perhaps isn’t so surprising given the artist’s obsession with lethal women. The first exceeds all previous depictions of the Biblical temptress by having her actually licking blood from the executioner’s sword. In the third picture she’s content merely to use a severed hand as a page-turner while John the Baptist’s mutilated body is carted away by servants.
The search for pictures turned up a blog I hadn’t seen before, Women in the Bible (“This is no religious blog!”), which has several Salomé postings. And there’s also Les voiles de Salomé: Labyrinthique errance, virevoltes et volutes.
Encor Salomé (1905).
Salomé (1908).
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive
Poster by Will Bradley for Victor Bicycles (c. 1895).
• G. Wayne Clough, chief exective of the Smithsonian Institution, finally admits that he made a hasty decision in removing David Wojnarowicz’s video from the Hide/Seek exhibition of gay art. Related: “Finland’s cultural gifts to the world include Sibelius, the Moomins and an artist that the country has been less eager to celebrate.” The belated homecoming of Tom of Finland.
• The Fiend with Twenty Faces: Jonathan Clements examines the legacy of Edogawa Rampo (Hirai Taro), the Japanese master of mystery and imagination.
• RIP Susannah York. The Guardian posted a selection of clips including one from Robert Altman’s Images (1972).
• More mixtapes: Trish Keenan’s Mind Bending Motorway Mix and a selection for Quietus by Chris & Cosey.
• “Ruin photos speak to our desperate desire to have our world re-enchanted.”
Promo poster by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat for My White Bicycle by Tomorrow (1967).
• The Raging Peloton: Iain Sinclair on two wheels good, four wheels bad.
• The unknown Jorge Luis Borges: five new anthologies reviewed.
• The French house untouched for 100 years (and also here).
• Electrotypes on Drugs: old chemists’ labels.
• South China Sea Pishkun by Dinh Q. Lê.
• Bike (1967) by Pink Floyd | My White Bicycle (1967) by Tomorrow | Trip On An Orange Bicycle (1968) by Orange Bicycle.
Self-portrait.
A French artist and another late Symbolist painter whose idiosyncracies point to Surrealism but whose obsession with femmes fatales looks back to the preoccupations of the fin de siècle. If you don’t mind the implicit misogyny there’s a lot more to be seen here and here.
Elle (1906).
Le baiser d’Hélène (1905).
Bruges-la-morte (1911).
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le Sphinx Mystérieux
• La belle sans nom
• The Feminine Sphinx
• Le Monstre
• Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal
• Empusa
• Bruges-la-Morte
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny (1967).
I made a post a while back about the work of Bob Pepper, an artist whose illustrations from the 1960s can also be described as psychedelic and who was equally visible in the music and book publishing worlds. Howard Bernstein (not to be confused with musician Howie B) wasn’t as prolific as Pepper but this post was prompted by the appearance at Sci-Fi-O-Rama of the swirling abstractions of his Roger Zelazny cover. Like Pepper, Bernstein produced album cover art as well as book covers although it’s possible the Zelazny piece may have been a one-off. This was the jacket of the first edition and a rather flagrant attempt by Doubleday to co-opt the trendiness of the psychedelic style for a science fiction readership. They tried something similar with the cover for Harlan Ellison’s landmark anthology Dangerous Visions in the same year, the art in that case being the work of Leo & Diane Dillon. The Zelazny cover caught my attention for another reason, the typography is a variation on the 19th century Kismet typeface by John F Cumming which I used for my two Alice in Wonderland calendars and which turns up regularly in psychedelic design. And while we’re considering conjunctions of music and science fiction, I ought to note that the Hawkwind song Lord of Light lifts its title from Zelazny’s novel.
The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra, Vol. I (1965).
As for Bernstein’s music work, most of this appears to have been for Bernard Stollman’s eccentric ESP Disk label where the roster of artists included many free-jazz greats along with The Fugs, William Burroughs, Timothy Leary and fringe psychedelic groups such as Pearls Before Swine, Cromagnon, The Godz and others. Bernstein’s Cromagnon cover (below) exists in both monochrome and coloured versions but the monochrome one seems to be the original. In fact much of his art looks like it was drawn in black-and-white with the colours being created by separations at the print stage. His poster for The Godz is especially striking, so much so I’m surprised to find there isn’t more of his work around. Wolfgang’s Vault has a blacklight poster and there are some other blacklight works here. If anyone knows of other posters, please leave a comment although I suspect if there was much more then Wolfgang’s Vault would have the goods.