{art} – Page 45 – { feuilleton }

The art of Hannes Bok, 1914–1964

Altars of Patagonia (1946)

Like the huge cache of Virgil Finlay art that turned up at the Internet Archive a couple of years ago, the pictures here are from a two-volume collection made by an enthusiast gathering together yet more illustrations from the pulp magazines of the 1940s and 50s. Hannes Bok (real name Wayne Francis Woodard) wasn’t as prolific as Virgil Finlay, but the careers of the two men intersected in the pages of Weird Tales where they both used stipple shading to compensate for the poor reproduction of pulp paper. Bok’s work tended to be more stylised than Finlay’s, with a quirkiness that makes his art easy to spot once you’ve seen a few examples.

Boomerang (1947)

The two volumes contain a total of over 300 illustrations so any selection will only be a small sampling. Many of the drawings were new to me. The first volume is mostly work from magazines such as Weird Tales and the minor SF mags; the second includes book covers, calendar illustrations and other work. As with the Finlay collections, both volumes are available in a range of file formats which include cbz files, a format I prefer to pdf for browsing image-heavy documents. For more about cbr/cbz files, see the end of this post.

Cross of Mercrux (1942)

Daughter of Darkness (1941)

Dimensional Doors (1944)

Continue reading “The art of Hannes Bok, 1914–1964”

Weekend links 730

Cover Design for ‘The Yellow Book’ Vol.I (1894) by Aubrey Beardsley.

• “[Dorian Gray’s] version of Decadence filled the popular imagination when Decadence became an ostentatiously stylish zeitgeist—stylish being the operative word. For Decadent style encapsulated the attitude of being hellbent on thrilling experiences.” The danger of Decadence is also its value. We need more of it, says Kate Hext.

• At Swan River Press: Of Wraiths, Spooks and Spectres. Robert Lloyd Parry, in an interview with John Kenny, talks about the researches that led to the compiling of his latest ghost-story collection, Friends and Spectres.

• The latest pictorial accumulation from DJ Food is a collection of late-60s concert posters by Jim Michaelson, an artist whose designs look like Mad magazine going fully psychedelic.

• Old music: Future Travel by David Rosenboom; new music: Taking Shasta Mountain (By Strategy) by John Von Seggern & Dean DeBenedictis.

• At Public Domain Review: Hunter Dukes on Rückenfiguren, views of the human back as a subject in the history of art.

• In a week when Adobe has been in the news for pissing off its users, a list of alternatives for Adobe software.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Hokusai-inspired erasers reveal Mt. Fuji the more they get used.

• At Unquiet Things: A celebration of Annie Stegg Gerard’s enchanting worlds.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – June 2024 by Ambientblog.

• At The Quietus: The Strange World of…Diamanda Galás.

• Wraith (2002) by Redshift | El Wraith (2002) by Amon Tobin | Wraith (2015) by John Carpenter

Friends and Spectres

Presenting my latest cover illustration for Swan River Press, and another story collection edited by Robert Lloyd Parry:

Friends and Spectres is a companion volume to Ghosts of the Chit-Chat (2020), an anthology of ghost stories by authors who had been members of the Cambridge University Chit-Chat Club along with M. R. James. Here the associations with MRJ are less formal, but stronger and more enduring: for it is the bond of genuine friendship that ties these writers to him.

The majority of pieces here were originally published under pseudonyms, and over half appeared first in amateur magazines or local newspapers. All deal with the supernatural, and several of the stories are themselves spectres—or more properly “revenants”, only now re-emerging into the light after decades of oblivion. There are rediscoveries here of “lost” tales by Arthur Reed Ropes, E. G. Swain, and the enigmatic “B.”

My cover for the earlier volume showed an imaginary interior for one of the meetings of the Chit-Chat Club where James first read his own ghost stories. The new cover shows a more accurate exterior view of the grounds outside the King’s College Chapel. Given the quantity of pictorial reference I thought this might be relatively easy to do but I had a problem finding a view that matched the one I had in mind, a twilight view of the west end of the chapel seen front-on rather than at a sharp angle. Views of the chapel from the banks of the river have been standing as an emblem of the university itself for a very long time but the majority of these are angled views. My solution was to work from a collage of three different reference photos in order to have enough drawing to fill out the spread of the jacket.

Friends and Spectres is another of Swan River’s small hardbacks which in this case is limited to 500 copies. Given the following that Mr Parry has accumulated via his readings of James’ stories I imagine this one will go quickly, so anyone interested is advised to pre-order now.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ghosts of the Chit-Chat

Weekend links 729

Phosphorus and Hesperus (1881) by Evelyn De Morgan.

• Mix of the week, or possibly the entire year: The Deep Ark, 167 tracks (over 8 hours of music), most of which are from the electronic deluge of the early 1990s. The download link may not work for all browsers—it didn’t for one of mine—but it is active. Via Simon Reynolds who has more about the Deep Ark project.

• At Nautilus: Betsy Mason on the use of stage magic to investigate animal behaviour. “By performing tricks for birds, monkeys, and other creatures, researchers hope to learn how they perceive and think about their world.”

• At The Daily Heller: Mad and the Usual Gang of Idiots. Meanwhile, Mr Heller’s font of the month may prove useful for this election season, a Jonathan Barnbrook design named Moron.

Looking back, you can see a pattern in those eras in which interest in telepathy boomed. Coined by Myers and his fellow psychical researchers in the 1880s, telepathy gained traction because it was formulated inside a moment of scientific and technological revolution, where uncanny transmissions proliferated across the visible and invisible spectrum, seeming to collapse the natural and the supernatural together. In the 1970s, telepathy returned, if under different names, as part of another moment of crisis. The Cold War arms race was an essential part of this, feeding a strange supplemental world of fantasy technologies, from mind control to brainwashing, and playing on an all-too-widespread psychological paranoia around being seen, infiltrated and manipulated by invisible agents.

Roger Luckhurst looks back at a century of psychic research

• New music: Portable Reality Generator by Field Lines Cartographer, and Sublime Eternal Love by Chrystabell and David Lynch.

• Coffee and Chocolates for Two Guitars: Robert Fripp interviewing John McLaughlin in July, 1982.

• Paintings by Ithell Colquhoun currently showing at the Ben Hunter gallery, London.

• At Public Domain Review: Eye Miniatures (ca. 1790–1810).

• ESP (1965) by Miles Davis | ESP (1990) by Deee-lite | ESP (2002) by Comets On Fire

The art of Vojtech Preissig, 1873–1944

Self-portrait.

There are times when one of my searches for work by an unfamiliar artist turns up results that are much more varied than I anticipated. Vojtech Preissig is one such artist, a Czech graphic designer, printmaker and typographer whose name I’d only registered in the past via digital revivals of his type designs. Preissig’s career follows a similar trajectory to that of his contemporary František Kupka: both artists started out working their own variations on fin-de-siècle art—Symbolism in Kupka’s case, Art Nouveau design in Preissig’s—before finding their way to abstraction in the 1930s. Both artists also worked for a time with Alphonse Mucha in Paris, until Preissig moved to the USA where he spent a number of years teaching.

When reading about European artists of this generation there’s always the question of how they fared during the Second World War. Preissig was among the less fortunate. After his return to Prague he spent his last few years putting his print skills to the service of the Czech Resistance. He ended his days in the concentration camp at Dachau.

A monograph, Vojtech Preissig by Lucie Vlckova, was published in 2012.

Day (1899).

Night (1899).

Dreaming (1899).

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