A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Design
Another portfolio of pochoir prints by French artist EA Séguy, Samarkande dates from around 1914 (online sources aren’t certain). The portfolio contained 20 prints of which 10 are shown here; a few more may be seen on this page. Pochoir was a stencil process popular with French artists of this period. It’s often alluded to without explanation so it’s good to find this post by Ashley Jones which not only describes the process but also shows more of Séguy’s work.
The Royal Mint celebrates 400 years of William Shakespeare with new £2 coins. The “Tragedies” design gives Britain the Gothiest coin of all time.
• “I hate successful films that travel on an easy wave of ‘good taste’: for me, that is simply anti-culture.” Cinematographer Luciano Tovoli talks to Alexandra Heller-Nicholas about photographing Dario Argento’s masterwork, Suspiria.
• Mixes of the week: Für die Liebe II, an hour of ambient drift by Matthew Dekay, and Carwyn Ellis Mixtape No. 354 by The Voice Of Cassandre.
• Americans in Europe: Frances Mayes on the enduring mystique of the Venetian lagoon, and David Farley on the trail of Kafka in Prague.
“We’d read that Brion Gysin and William Burroughs had played around with some scientific equipment from Columbia University,” [Jim] Jarmusch recalls. It was “some kind of strobe light that they claimed, by placing eidetic pulses on the outside of your eyelids, could cause states of hallucination and trance. We found out how to check out this machine and experimented with … not fantastic results! In a way though, Luc [Sante] channels ghosts: he’s able to imagine and mentally reconstruct events and places from the past and weave them into stories. He can cross influences like Blaise Cendrars and JG Ballard with James M Cain and Raymond Roussel.”
[…]
If New York celebrates amnesia, perpetual transformation, accelerated obsolescence – and offers newcomers a blank slate, a chance to be born again – then Sante offers a mordantly heretical vision of the city. For him it’s full of layers and depths, of echoes and eerie reverberations, of occult whispers. “The tech crowd thinks that we can’t afford the past to be sitting on our shoulders. It’s a burden, a dead weight. We’ve got to innovate constantly. We have to … disrupt. But the 20th century is littered with valuable stuff – writers, ideas, daily certainties – that gets discarded and that needs to be picked up and looked at again.”
Sukhdev Sandhu profiles writer Luc Sante
• The Edge Question for 2016: What do you consider the most interesting recent (scientific) news? What makes it important?
• Bradley L. Garrett’s foreword for Secret Tunnels of England: Folklore and Fact (2015), a book by Antony Clayton.
• Caitlin R. Green on the monstrous landscape of medieval Lincolnshire.
• Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan by Brian Eno.
• Arche (live, 2013) by Master Musicians of Bukkake.
• A Year In The Country returns for another year.
• Kafka (1982) by Masami Tsuchiya | Manhattan (1984) by Seigen Ono | Tunnel (1997) by Biosphere
Fathomless Sounding (1932) by Gertrude Hermes.
This should have been the last post of the year but Ken Murphy’s film made a more fitting end. This is still the laziest post of the year, however, being a review of the artists/designers/photographers from 50 or so weekend posts. Scroll down to see what caught my attention over the past twelve months.
Untitled drawing by Jean Gourmelin.
Cover by Valentine Hugo for Contes Bizarres (1933) by Achim d’Arnim. See Hugo’s interior illustrations here.
Kopfleisten.
A few plates by Koloman Moser from Allegorien: Neue Folge (1896), a collection of allegorical drawings, graphics and emblems by a number of artists in Moser’s circle, including Gustav Klimt, Franz Stuck and Carl Otto Czeschka. I keep hoping someone might upload a complete set of these plates but this doesn’t seem to have happened yet. Publisher and editor Martin Gerlach later commissioned Die Quelle (1901), a book of patterns and designs by Moser, several of which prefigure the tessellations of MC Escher.
Frühlingsmorgen.
Jagd.
Tyrrhenian Sea and Solstice Sky by Danilo Pivato.
Danilo Pivato’s marvellous photograph of the December sun was NASA’s winter solstice photo of the day for 2014, although it actually dates from 2005. (And they’d also posted it twice before.)
The multiplicity of heavenly bodies makes me think of the Hipgnosis cover for Harmony of the Spheres (1979), an excellent album by Neil Ardley. I think that’s the moon rather than the sun but the robed figure suits the solstice moment. This wasn’t the first time that Hipgnosis had a mysterious figure contemplating the landscape although by 1979 it was probably the last.