A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Art
Speculative designs for kitchen utensils by artist and designer Sayaka Yamamoto.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Elizabeth Goluch’s precious metal insects
• Kelly McCallum’s insect art
• Thomas Paul’s sealife
• Laura Zindel’s ceramics
• The art of Jo Whaley
• The art of Philippe Wolfers, 1858–1929
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• Lucien Gaillard
• Insect Lab
Do you detect a theme here? The 360º Cities site which I linked to yesterday won’t be news to some since its panorama views are now incorporated into Google Earth. I hadn’t fully investigated it before, however, so I wasted some time today wandering the streets of Bruges almost as you would in a computer game thanks to the way the different panoramas are linked. Clicking the arrows or the thumbnail views means you’re immediately transported to the next location. (Needless to say this works best using the full screen option on a large monitor.) The photographs in this instance are by Robin de Baere.
Bruges is another of those waterlogged places with cobbled streets which so beguile me, hence the choice of a Belgian town over more obvious European locations. The light skies in the night shots—a result of long exposures—lend the empty streets some of the same mysterious atmosphere captured by René Magritte in his Empire of Light series. Magritte was Belgian, of course, so it’s rather fitting, as was Paul Delvaux, another painter of noctural mystery.
Empire of Light by René Magritte (1953–54).
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bruges-la-Morte
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux
Life magazine for August 5th, 1909, with an illustration by Coles Phillips.
02009? Read this.
Happy new year!
Given the time of year it’s a temptation to vent spleen and post something by the great Charles Addams. But rather than burden you with churlishness I’ll point instead to Colorscreen, a piece of web abstraction inspired by Olafur Eliasson. By the same programmer, there’s also the Random Color Generator.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The New York City Waterfalls
• Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson
• Olafur Eliasson’s BMW
• Olafur Eliasson’s Serpentine Pavilion
• New Olafur Eliasson
The Juggler Sun (1895).
On the shortest day of the year it seems fitting to post a picture of the sun and hope that in 2009 the clouds clear long enough for us Brits to see more than a month of it. Claude Fayette Bragdon’s poster is a remarkably stylised work for 1895 and might easily have been produced twenty or more years later. The Chap-Book was a periodical which included Bragdon among its illustrators although none of the cover designs to be found online are this striking. Bragdon wasn’t only an illustrator, however.
A man of many talents, Claude Fayette Bragdon (1866–1946) was an architect, artist, writer, philosopher, and stage designer. Bragdon’s work in these varied fields interrelated and overlapped, tied together by his theosophical belief in creating and communicating beauty. After a successful career as an architect in Rochester, NY, Bragdon entered the world of stage design in 1919, at the age of 53, by consenting to design a traveling production of Hamlet for actor-producer and personal friend Walter Hampden. Bragdon’s arrival in the world of theater came at a time when significant changes in staging techniques were on the horizon. (More.)
I usually celebrate polymathy but in Bragdon’s case his varied interests seem to have deprived us of more work by a unique illustrative talent. The indispensable VTS has further examples of his clean style from a 1915 treatise on architecture and design, Projective Ornament. It was increasingly common during this period to regard ornamentation in architecture as a 19th century evil to be purged from all future buildings, a concept expressed most notoriously by Adolf Loos in his 1908 essay, Ornament and Crime. Bragdon engaged with the argument by proposing that architects put aside historical and natural pastiche and look to geometry for a new style of decoration. His illustrations in Projective Ornament are beautifully done and some (like the one below) might almost be the work of an Art Deco illustrator such as George Barbier.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Decorative Age
• Images of Nijinsky