{painting} – Page 145 – { feuilleton }

Anamorphosis

Some anamorphosis for All Fool’s Day. De Artificiali Perspectiva, or Anamorphosis (1991) is a short film by the Brothers Quay which can be seen in two parts at YouTube. (And I’d urge anyone interested to avail themselves of the essential double-disc collection of the Quays’ early work which includes this film.) There are plenty of sites devoted to anamorphosis such as this one but films tend to explain the effect better than still pictures by showing the stages of transformation to or from pictorial coherence. The stills below, for example, work better in motion than they do here. The Quay’s first feature, Institute Benjamenta (1995), also features some anamorphosis with a mural on the walls of a passage in the film’s strange school for servants.

Also at YouTube there’s a short video demonstration of mirror anamorphosis, a variation where the distorted picture corrects itself when viewed with a mirrored tube. Musician Rick Wakeman used this effect for an album he released in 1976, No Earthly Connection, a work whose cover art is more impressive than the music it embellishes. The album came with a thin sheet of mirrored plastic which could be folded to create a viewing device.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Ambassadors in detail
• False perspective
• Trompe l’oeil

The Salomé paintings of Caroline Smith

Seduction.

One of a series of paintings by a British artist, and what a great series it is with echoes of ancient art as well as Gustav Klimt. Also further evidence that this theme isn’t a wholly masculine preoccupation.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive

Weekend links 52

Three Seekers (2009) by Kelly Louise Judd.

• Kevin Sessums talked to Elizabeth Taylor in 1997 about Tennessee Williams, her AIDS activism and related matters. Other related matters: Catholics lead the way on same-sex marriage and Mahatma Gandhi was in love with a German body-builder named Hermann.

• Cray porn (the computer, that is) at Barnbrook Design as the CD package for Interplay by John Foxx and The Maths is unveiled.

• Michael Rother and Friends Play the Music Of Neu! A stream of an hour-long concert from August 2010.

One of the tragedies of drug prohibition is that we have never developed a culture in which young people can learn how to use powerful drugs properly from older, wiser and more experienced psychonauts. I count myself lucky to have encountered such good teachers to guide me with such drugs as LSD, psilocybin, DMT, MDMA and mescaline.

Dr Susan Blackmore on using LSD.

• Another Dispatch in a World of Multiple Veils, a new release by Arkhonia.

• Micromachina by Scott Bain “examines what makes the insect world tick”.

• Down with art!: the age of manifestos. Related: The Manifesto Manifesto.

• John Patterson: “We’re all living in the future as seen by Philip K Dick.”

• Music To Play In The Dark: A Wake For Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson.

• Albert Einstein, Radical: A Political Profile.

• Was “God’s Wife” edited out of the Bible?

• Porn made for women, by women.

• Hallogallo (1972) by Neu! | Opa-Loka (1975) by Hawkwind | Jenny Ondioline (1993) by Stereolab | Hallogallo (1997) by Porcupine Tree.

Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #15

Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. This week there’s another jump in the running order, from volume 12 to 15, and it’s impossible to avoid feeling frustrated by this when some of the previous editions have been so good. Volume 15 covers the period from October 1904 to March 1905, and includes work by the Wiener Werkstätte whose rectilinear designs mark the transition from Art Nouveau to what would eventually be called Art Deco. There’s also another feature on the Glasgow Arts and Crafts movement based around Charles Rennie Mackintosh with a look at the designs for Hill House in Helensburgh, Scotland. As usual, anyone wishing to see these samples in greater detail is advised to download the entire volume at the Internet Archive. There’ll be more DK&D next week.

The peculiar Symbolist paintings of gay artist Sascha Schneider are featured once again, and typically for this artist there’s a profusion of male flesh on display.

Continue reading “Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #15”

The Arms of the Art

The Arms of the Art (2000).

An addendum to the Splendor Solis post. The Arms of the Art was a drawing I did in 2000 intended to inaugurate a series of pencil improvisations based on the Splendor Solis alchemical plates. As things turned out I only managed the first in the series (the picture it uses as a starting point is here) and about half of the second one which is languishing in a pad somewhere. Nothing in this drawing was planned or sketched beforehand, it was all done directly onto the paper, the idea being that I’d take the basic symbols or elements of each plate as a starting point and see what emerged once I began moving the pencil around. What usually emerges in these situations is a kind of abstracted landscape of hybrid forms that could be either mineral, organic or something in between. Some of the paintings I was doing in the 1990s followed a similar process, the challenge being to see how far you can develop things without the result becoming either too pictorial or too abstract; the painting below is an earlier example. I still like the idea of re-interpreting the Splendor Solis, and if I didn’t have other projects in progress I might be prepared to try it again. Maybe later.

Eidolon (1997).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Splendor Solis