{art} – Page 504 – { feuilleton }

Illuminated ice

The International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival at Harbin in north-east China excels itself this year with its illuminated ice sculptures. Some of these creations are so elaborate they must spend months planning them. The Boston Globe’s Big Picture has a page of incredible photos and a film report of the event.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lumiere at Durham
• Tetragram for Enlargement
• Eno’s Luminous Opera House panorama
• The art of Rune Guneriussen
• Lightmark
• Exotic France in Harbin
• Giant Lantern Festival
• Maximum Silence by Giancarlo Neri
• Volume at the V&A

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