{art} – Page 8 – { feuilleton }

A feast of Poe

King Pest by Alberto Martini.

My thanks to the estimable Mr Shea for bringing to my attention this website devoted to the many illustrated editions of Edgar Allan Poe. Quite a few of the older illustrations have been featured here in the past but most of the later ones are new to me. The site is comprehensive enough to include my own illustrated edition from 2017, a book whose shortcomings I often find myself apologising for. (I was very pressured for time with that commission, and would welcome an opportunity to redo some of the pictures.)

A Descent into the Maelström by Alberto Martini.

I could draw attention to the later editions but I’ll single out the work of Alberto Martini (1876–1954), an Italian artist whose work I find especially attractive for the way it provides a bridge between Decadence and Surrealism. His Poe illustrations appear now and then in books or articles about horror fiction but you seldom see all of them together.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Alberto Martini.

Meanwhile, Ted Parmelee’s short but very effective animated adaptation of The Tell-Tale Heart (1953) turned up recently at the Internet Archive in a copy that’s the best I’ve seen to date. Watch it here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Robert Lawson’s House of Usher
• Edmund Dulac’s illustrated Poe
• The Fall of the House of Usher, 1928
• The Purloined Eidolon
• Martin van Maële’s illustrated Poe
• Mask of the Red Death, 1969
• Narraciones extraordinarias by Edgar Allan Poe
• Fritz Eichenberg’s illustrated Poe
• The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrated Poe
• Burt Shonberg’s Poe paintings
• Illustrating Poe #5: Among the others
• Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty
• Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke>
• Illustrating Poe #2: William Heath Robinson
• Illustrating Poe #1: Aubrey Beardsley
• Poe at 200
• The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA
• William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe

Weekend links 801

The Magic Circle (1886) by John William Waterhouse.

• The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic has just been published in France by Editions Delcourt. A preview here shows how carefully they’ve managed to translate and reletter my page designs.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Algernon Blackwood’s stories of John Silence, occult detective.

• Relevant to some of my recent reading: The Necronomicon Wars, an examination of the many attempts to give life to HP Lovecraft’s fictional grimoire.

Altered States is tremendously exciting to watch—and not only during its psychedelic interludes when goat Jesus is being crucified and writhing red figures are toppling, Hieronymus Bosch–like, into hell and abstract splotches give the impression of cells endlessly dividing or murky membranes dissolving and beautiful women stare into Magritte skies and waves of lava crash as though the molten core of humanity itself were erupting. Even in its quieter moments, it is a beautiful film, with Hurt’s every appearance shot by cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth to emphasize his character’s alien otherworldliness.

Jessica Kiang explores the creation of Ken Russell’s flawed but fascinating psychedelic feature, Altered States

• A new catalogue of lots at another After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn. etc.

• Tarot decks through the ages: a video showing some of the cards from Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection.

• More psychedelia: Neuroscientist Grigori Guitchounts asks “What is your brain doing on psychedelics?”

• At the Daily Heller: Ryan Hughes has published a weighty collection of his typeface designs.

• Old music: Caged (25th Anniversary Edition) by Ian Boddy & Chris Carter.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty selects 10 great Technicolor melodramas.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: The Old School Horrors of Terence Fisher.

• Photographs from the 2025 Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

• Ambientblog celebrates 20 years of existence.

• RIP Dave Ball.

• Necronomicon (1970) by Les Baxter | Liriïk Necronomicus Kahnt (1975) by Magma | Necronomicon–The Magus (2004) by John Zorn

Modern Pen Drawings, 1901

Rustum and the Simoorg (1897) by Patten Wilson.

A new arrival at the Internet Archive. Modern Pen Drawings: European and American is a special number of The Studio magazine, one of several such numbers which they published in book form. The magazine’s editor, Charles Holme, edited the volume which maintains the high quality typical of all these publications, with excellent reproductions and informative notes about the artists and their works. Holme’s choices in collections such as this are always varied, mixing imaginative illustrations with comic drawings and nature studies. For a reader, the books are still useful today for showing you drawings that you might not see anywhere else, even when the artist is a familiar name. When the works themselves are familiar the reproductions are invariably better than you’ll find elsewhere. Such is the case with Patten Wilson’s “Rustum and the Simoorg”, an illustration of a Persian folk tale whose fine lines and details are often spoiled by poor printing. Elsewhere there are two pages of Théophile Steinlen’s inevitable cats, a drawing by Fernand Khnopff that I don’t think I’ve seen before, and Edmund J. Sullivan’s rose-bedecked skeleton which Alton Kelley later “repurposed” (or swiped) for the cover of the Grateful Dead’s second live album.

Continue reading “Modern Pen Drawings, 1901”

Weekend links 800

Plate 43 from Los Caprichos: The sleep of reason produces monsters (El sueño de la razon produce monstruos) (1799) by Francisco Goya.

• At Senses of Cinema: An interview with Jacques Rivette from 2001 in which the director passes judgment on a variety of feature films, old and new. Having read a couple of Cocteau-related books recently, I was pleased to see his comments about the importance of Cocteau’s example for his own film-making. Via MetaFilter.

• “Why is sleep, which literally occurs daily on a planetary scale, so often taken for granted, and not only by most people but even by scientists? Perhaps because its essence, its key property, is to be elusive, out of sight?” A long read by Vladyslav Vyazovskiy on the nature of sleep.

• “Often one cannot be sure if an object in a Welch picture is drawn from life or from other depictions of it, in sculpture, porcelain, woodwork or embroidery.” Alan Hollinghurst on the paintings and drawings of Denton Welch. (Previously.)

• At Colossal: Sinister skies set the scene for derelict buildings in Lee Madgwick’s surreal paintings.

• New music: The Mosaic Of Starlight Slips Back Like The Lid Of An Opening Eye by Paul Schütze.

• At Public Domain Review: Charles le Brun’s Human-Animal Hybrids (1806).

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – October 2025 at Ambientblog.

• At the BFI: Anton Bitel chooses 10 great French horror films.

• Winners of the 2025 Photomicrography Competition.

• RIP Diane Keaton.

• Sleep (1981) by This Heat | Sleep (1995) by Paul Schütze | Sleep (2006) by DJ Olive

Ambagious Tactics

Ambagious Tactics is a box containing 120 small white cards, most of which show a short aphorism, suggestion or piece of advice for the creatively-minded. A few cards at the end of the box feature line drawings instead of words; there are also three blank cards for the user’s own contributions. Anyone familiar with Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies will recognise the form: “over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas” which artists, writers (and anyone else) can use as a prompt to jolt a creative endeavour away from familiar ruts or to provide a solution to an impasse or problem.

The first deck of Oblique Strategies was published in an edition of 500 copies 50 years ago which makes Ambagious Tactics an anniversary celebration as well as “An Oblique Tribute Act—A choir of over 100 versatile enigmas”. The main difference between the Strategies and the tributes is that the Strategies were mostly the work of Eno and Schmidt, although I think Eno says somewhere that the pair asked friends and colleagues for contributions. For the tributes Alistair Fruish has collected a single suggestion from many different people, myself included:

Some of these creatives are connected to Eno and Schmidt, and some are folk who regularly used Oblique Strategies, others are members of Arts Labs around the country, and some people were asked for the hell of it.

I’m very familiar with Oblique Strategies, mostly via their recent manifestations as online editions or freeware applications. The only physical deck I’ve seen is Alan Moore’s heavily-used first edition, and Alan happens to be one of the contributors to this deck.

My own contribution may seem a little glib or obvious at first: when you’re creating something you’re invariably on the lookout for things you don’t like. The question is intended to have a wider reach than this, and refers to something Jon Hassell used to talk about with regard to his own creations: the question of what you really like in a fundamental sense, and how this can be distilled into your own creative activities. Asking yourself what you really like helps you avoid falling into the slipstream of prevailing trends (unless that’s what you really like…), or doing something solely to fulfil other people’s expectations. Hassell couldn’t be involved with the project so this was my attempt to bring some of his own thinking to the tribute act. My original idea—”Do the washing up”—was one I had to reject after I confirmed that it’s one of the suggestions you’ll find in Oblique Strategies. (It’s one I recommend all the same. Try it.)

Ambagious Tactics has been published by the Northampton ArtsLab and Alan Moore’s Mad Love imprint. I don’t know how much you might have to pay if you want a set of the cards but there’s an email address on this page for those requiring further details.

Before I started writing this post I thought I’d see what random suggestion the Oblique Strategies application on my phone might have to offer. The advice is suitably oblique and rather fitting as well:

Revaluation (a warm feeling)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jon Hassell, 1937–2021
• Imaginary Landscapes: A film on Brian Eno