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Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East

Love by Hassan Massoudy.

Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East
The British Museum
18 May–3 September 2006
Room 35
Admission free

Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East is an exhibition based largely on the collections of the British Museum complemented by a number of loans. It demonstrates the imaginative ways in which artists across the Middle East and North Africa are using the power of the written word in their art today.

The exhibition includes wonderful examples of calligraphy transforming writing into art, books of poetry, and works which reflect current issues facing the modern Middle East.

Opening times
Daily 10.00–17.30
Open late Thursday & Friday until 20.30

The art of Cai Guo-Qiang

Inopportune: Stage One (2004).
9 cars and sequenced multi-channel tube lights.

Inopportune: Stage Two (2004).

Tigers: papier-mâché, plaster, fibreglass, resin, painted hide.
Arrows: brass, bronze, bamboo, feathers.
Backdrop: Styrofoam, wood, canvas, acrylic paint.

Haunter latest

My book of Lovecraft adaptations and illustrations, The Haunter of the Dark and other Grotesque Visions (Creation Oneiros), is now available for pre-order from a number of outlets, including Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Barnes & Noble.

Publication is officially set for September 15th, 2006.
Sample pages and other news here.

“At its far edge, horror shades into beauty, and it is far beyond
that edge that Coulthart takes us, into terrible magnificence.”
Alan Moore, in the book’s introduction

“A terrific book, haunting and beautiful.
That writer from Providence would have been proud…”
Neil Gaiman

The art of Paul Laffoley

Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from the Earth (1990).

Vintage magazine art II

In the days before colour photography most magazine covers were created by illustrators (as the New Yorker still is), a situation that’s left behind a rich legacy of wonderful artwork often far more stimulating than any of the magazine contents. This site has a great collection of early Vogue covers that show an amazing amount of variety and originality at play. Some of these early issues even break with the understandable stricture for a fashion magazine of having a female figure as the focus.

Looking over this selection, it’s impossible not to compare the rich designs of the 1920s with today’s bland uniformity. Vogue now looks like any other magazine for women, with an overly made-up (often celebrity) face filling the cover and the whole picture crowded with sub-headings and a general clutter of typography. UK Vogue‘s own cover archive pages show the gradual degeneration of a stylish flagship to a condition of cultural muzak over the passage of ninety years.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Vintage magazine art I
• View: The Modern Magazine