{art} – Page 496 – { feuilleton }

Joseph Cavalieri’s stained glass

The Good Ship Ménage À Trois (2008).

New York artist Joseph Cavalieri‘s stained glass work using Simpsons characters received a flurry of blogospheric attention recently. Of more interest for me is his gay-themed panels like the one above which show a different approach to the medium from that taken by Diego Tolomelli.

Gormenghast (2009).

And since I happen to be re-reading Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy at the moment, this panel was especially noteworthy. See the full piece here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mervyn Peake at Maison d’Ailleurs
• Harry Clarke’s stained glass
• IKO stained glass

More science fiction covers

These science fiction cover galleries are becoming so ubiquitous it hardly seems worth cataloguing a new discovery. However… This pair are from the George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection at the University of Buffalo Libraries:

The UB Libraries’ George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection includes over 30,000 pulp fiction books and magazines. A selection of cover art images, representing more than 500 crime fiction and science fiction volumes found in the Kelley Collection, is featured in UBdigit. Colorful and dynamic, the cover art highlights a variety of artistic themes and imagery, reflecting the social and cultural trends of the period in which these covers were created. (More.)

The documentation is rather scant, unfortunately, but I recognised the Driftglass cover as being by Bob Pepper while the Brian N Ball (who he?) cover is a splendid piece of work by Kelly Freas which can be seen at a larger size and free of type here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Bob Pepper

The Art of Fontana Modern Masters

Design by John Constable, painting by Oliver Bevan (1971).

James Pardey was in touch again this week with news of his a book cover site which follows his earlier (and justly praised) Art of Penguin Science Fiction. The new site The Art of Fontana Modern Masters presents the abstract cover designs for Fontana’s collection of pocket-sized introductions to notable writers, philosophers and scientists. My own copy of the Joyce volume from the initial run of the series is shown above. A note on the back cover states that Oliver Bevan’s painting is part of a single work arranged across ten books which “can be rearranged to form a variety of patterns”. In a pitch to some presumed “collect-the-set” mentality among intellectuals, this idea was continued on later books in the series and James’s site gives an idea of how the covers might be arranged. Until I saw all these covers together I hadn’t realised how impressive the series looks. As with the Penguin site there’s copious information about the production and evolution of the designs.

If that’s not enough, James has a short essay about the series at Eye magazine and HarperCollins (who bought out Fontana) are producing a fine art print of the entire run of covers as shown above. For more details about that, go here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Penguin science fiction

The art of Henri Privat-Livemont, 1861–1936

left: Absinthe Robette (1896); right: Bitter Oriental (1897).

Henri Privat-Livemont, a Belgian artist and one of the best of the post-Mucha Art Nouveau stylists. I’ve featured his Absinthe Robette poster before but am including it again since it’s my favourite of the ones I’ve seen. All of these are from the Art of the Poster 1880–1918 collection at Lawrence University whose copies can be explored in extreme close-up.

Biscuits & Chocolat Delacre (1896).

Le Masque Anarchiste (1897).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Absinthe girls

Vision Quest

Artwork: Accepting Fear Rather Than Trying to Understand It by Jason Leinwand.

Pam at Phantasmaphile follows last year’s Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists show by curating a new exhibition, Vision Quest, at Observatory, Brooklyn, NYC later this month:

…each piece in VISION QUEST explores the archetype of the shamanic voyage, using the tools of paint, pencil, or paper in lieu of fire, flower, feather. Taken together this work represents a full spectrum of what it means to go underground and out of body; to go there and come back again, perhaps just a little bit wiser or, at the very least, more wide awake.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Jesse Bransford • William Crump • Scott Gursky • Juliet Jacobsen • Ashley Lande • Adela Leibowitz • Jason Leinwand • Christopher Mir • Joe Newton • Herbert Pfostl • Christopher Reiger • Christine Shields • Erika Somogyi • Jessie Rose Vala

More details at Phantasmaphile. Meanwhile, a reminder that the similarly-themed Strange Attractor Salon opens this week at Viktor Wynd Fine Art, London. It’s looking like I’ll be too busy to attend the opening as the world crawls back to work after the holiday season but many of the other featured artists should be there on Thursday night if you happen to be in the East End.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Strange Attractor Salon
• Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists