A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Painting
Another European artist who enjoys invented and ruined architecture. There seems to be little information about him or his work online, however, aside from the links below.
• Interview at ArtsLivre (in French)
• A gallery page
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
It wouldn’t surprise me if there are more examples of the fashion world borrowing the Flandrin pose but this is the only one I’ve seen so far, part of a 1998 art-inspired photo series by Mario Sorrenti for Yves Saint-Laurent. There don’t seem to be any larger copies available, unfortunately.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Last Suppers and last straws
• The last circle of the Inferno
(No title) from Sadao Hasegawa 01 (1990).
It’s good to be able to finish the year with another artistic discovery. I’d not come across Sadao Hasegawa’s work before but this page has an extensive (complete?) selection of his paintings and drawings. This is gay erotica with a twist, being Japanese in origin yet incorporating figures and symbolism derived from Indian or Thai mythology, detailed psychotropic invention and the kind of angular motifs common in much illustration and design of the 1980s. A heady brew, in other words, and quite unique as a result, which makes it all the more tragic that he committed suicide in 1999. At least one of his books, Paradise Visions, is still available in Japan but a decent collection of his work for a western audience is obviously long overdue.
Paradise Visions (1996).
Midvinterblot by Carl Larsson, showing the sacrifice of King Domalde.
If you were in Brighton, England today, you could celebrate Burning the Clocks.
A Pictorial Sequence by RH Ives Gammell Based on
The Hound of Heaven (1956):
left: Panel II—I Fled Him, Down The Nights and Down The Days.
right: Panel XI—Would Clash It To.
I mentioned Francis Thompson’s poem The Hound of Heaven in the Stella Langdale post a couple of days ago. There don’t appear to be any examples of those pictures online but there are a few samples of RH Ives Gammell‘s remarkable paintings based on the same work which Claire alerted me to last month. Gammell (1893–1981) was an American realist with a forthright attitude that set him against Modernist and later art trends yet he was still able to incorporate a more contemporary approach to composition in these unique works. Too often pitching yourself against the present results in the kind of reactionary posturing one sees at the Art Renewal Center where they wish they could turn the clock back to a time before Picasso. Gammell was smarter than that and his Thompson paintings are a striking series of Tarot-like depictions of Christian mysticism.
Once again I have to make the complaint that there aren’t many good reproductions of these works online at the moment; a complete set of the pictures would be a start. The paintings themselves can be seen at the Maryhill Museum of Art, Goldendale, Washington, USA.
• RH Ives Gammell by Elizabeth Ives Hunter
• Transcending Vision; details of a 2001 exhibition
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Stella Langdale, 1880–1976