{painting} – Page 195 – { feuilleton }

Weel done, Cutty-sark!

Brad David wrote last week asking about the picture I used on the recent Jack Rose poster design. I’d seen this engraving for years in various books but was unsure of its provenance so the enquiry made me curious as well. The picture in question is an illustration for the poem Tam O’Shanter by Robert Burns and since it’s a depiction of cavorting witches and warlocks it turns up frequently in occult encyclopedias.

After a bit of searching it transpires that the engraving is based on a series of six paintings illustrating the poem by Scottish artist John Faed (1819–1902). Here we’re seeing the moment just before drunken Tam (his face visible at the window) shouts “Weel done, Cutty-sark!” to the young witch in the centre, whereupon the lights go out and a shrieking horde of angry witches chase him home.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Obverse Paintings by Fred Chuang

Au-gel (2006).

Resuming my mixed-media, collage work, and experimenting with gold-on-gold effects, this small painting incorporates the figure, printed on tissue paper with “printed” bird wings. The textural effects in the wings suggests a more “butterfly” metaphor, but the texture of the feathers can be more clearly seen in the actual work.

More of Fred Chuang’s obverse angels (and other beings) here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Czanara’s Hermaphrodite Angel

Masterpieces of Persian painting

Shamseh, Unknown artist, Indian Moraqqa?.
First half of 17th century, Golestan Palace.

Sixteen pages of paintings at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Prince Iskandar’s horoscope
• Calligraphy by Mouneer Al-Shaárani
• The Journal of Ottoman Calligraphy
• Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East

The art of Agostino Arrivabene

Lo psiconauta (2006).

Capriccio con ruderi di città ideale (2003).

Vanitas su zolla di viole (2006).

I’ve tagged this as “gay” since the first painting is featured in the controversial Arte E Omosessualita’. Da von Gloeden a Pierre et Gilles at the Palazzo della Ragione, Milan. That exhibition has caused as stir with Catholics who demanded that Paolo Schmidlin’s Miss Kitty, which shows the current Pope in drag, be removed.

Whatever Agostino Arrivabene‘s sexuality he’s no slouch with a paintbrush, and all the sections on his site are worth looking at. The “Paesaggi” section features some architectural caprices, there’s a section of vanitas works and a fair amount of artistic quotation; I spotted references to Piranesi, Boulée and George Minne, among others.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Vanitas paintings
• Giant Skeleton and the Chocolate Jesus

Masonic fonts and the designer’s dark materials

The trailer for The Golden Compass turned up this week, the first part of Philip Pullman‘s His Dark Materials trilogy, and I can’t help but note that the film’s designers have chosen Jonathan Barnbrook’s Mason font for the titles and the rest of the typography. This isn’t so surprising given that Mason has been used on the covers of several editions of the books already but I wonder if this flush of even greater popularity will spell (as it were) the end of a stylish typeface.

Mason (originally named Manson) was one of Barnbrook’s earliest published type designs, appearing in 1992 via the Emigré foundry, and over the past fifteen years has been widely imitated and become the default font for fantasy works, especially book jackets. The attraction for the genre is obvious in the way the design uses elegant and traditional serif letterforms that have been amended slightly to give them a distinctive quasi-ecclesiastical flavour, with flourishes derived from Greek, Renaissance and Biblical letters. The Gothic arch of the letter A has also helped make the font a popular choice for New Age or occult books. Mason was designed as a set of serif and sans serif variations but it’s Mason Serif Regular which is used the most. (The cover for The Science of His Dark Materials shown here is using both the sans serif variation and Mason Regular Alternate.)

Distinctive fonts take a while to get around and I don’t recall seeing Mason until at least 1994. From 1995 to 2000 it began to appear everywhere, even in newspaper ads for a while, before finding a permanent place in the book world. The trouble with this kind of ubiquity is that the novelty the design once possessed quickly vanishes and it begins to runs the risk of becoming a design cliché. Many typefaces go this way, especially in the publishing world where the choice of typeface is often dictated by genre expectations. So Orbit-B and its variants used to signify “science fiction” or “the future” in the 1970s, Caslon Antique and Rubens have become associated with horror while FF Confidential has been over-used for crime novels.

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