A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Design
When you work your way through a director’s filmography, particularities of mise-en-scène often become apparent. Nicolas Winding Refn’s next film—The Neon Demon—has a title that promises more of the same. I’m looking forward to it.
Pusher (1996)
Kim Bodnia (above) and Laura Drasbæk (below).
Bleeder (1999)
Zlatko Buric (above) and Kim Bodnia (below).
Untitled artwork by Melinda Gebbie.
• “Johnny Rocket is like a Chaucerian epic retold by David Peace with music by Bruce Haack and The Focus Group for a music hall located in Hell.” John Doran talks to Maxine Peake and the Eccentronic Research Council about their “psychedelic ouija pop”.
• Allison Meier looks at a new exhibition of Victor Moscoso’s psychedelic drawings. Related: Julia Bigham writing in Eye magazine in 2001 about London’s psychedelic poster scene.
• “Oh to eye the very enfilade through which that orchidaceous entity would make his stately progress…” Strange Flowers on the eccentric Count Stenbock.
• Melinda Gebbie: What Is The Female Gaze? The artist is in conversation next month with Mark Pilkington and Tai Shani at the Horse Hospital, London.
• Pamela Colman Smith: She Believes in Fairies. The Tarot artist and illustrator in a rare interview from 1912.
• Minimalist posters: “a lack of nuance disguised as insight,” says John Brownlee.
• Saturday night in the City of the Dead: Richard Metzger on the John Foxx-era Ultravox.
• The Will Gregory Moog Ensemble plays the Brandenberg Concerto No. 3.
• “In a weird way”: a brief history of a phrase by Ivan Kreilkamp.
• Die Hexe: An installation by Alex Da Corte.
• RIP Daevid Allen
• You Can’t Kill Me (1971) by Gong | Master Builder (1974) by Gong | When (1982) by Daevid Allen
When it comes to my work for the music world, this week has ranged from one pole to the other. On Tuesday Enki , the album whose cover I designed last year for Melechesh, was released in the US on multiple formats including coloured vinyl and (if you want the expensive option) a CD with bundled T-shirt; on Wednesday local musicians Watch Repair released The Tidal Path, a hand-crafted CD-R limited to 100 copies for which I designed the Risographed insert.
Musically you can’t compare these releases, and it would be unwise to do so, they’re both operating in very different areas. Watch Repair (who otherwise prefer to remain anonymous) have for the past two years been producing a distinct form of improvised music that combines acoustic instruments, ambient recordings and treated/processed sounds. The predominant atmosphere on The Tidal Path is winter, frozen water and icy wastes, hence the choice of an old map of the northern polar regions for the insert artwork. The map also features a few surreptitious references to related works by other artists but I’ll leave it to informed listeners to detect those. The Tidal Path is a release on Manchester’s Ono label which may be ordered from Piccadilly Records.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Watch Repair
Presenting the second in what is now a series of travel posters for the fictional regions of Old Weird Britain. In 2012 I created a poster for the village of Milbury from Children of the Stones, a design derived from the London Transport posters of the 1920s promoting destinations outside the city. At the time I had a vague idea of maybe doing more in this style but it’s taken this long to produce something new.
Summerisle is an obvious choice but not necessarily an easy one. The popularity of The Wicker Man means that a small cottage industry of Summerisle souvenirs already exists, most of the products being concerned with the events of May Day 1973. A travel poster would represent a location rather than a single date so that wasn’t a problem, but I also wanted to avoid any Wicker Man silhouettes. The appearance of the Wicker Man at the end of the film is a secret being revealed, it’s not something the islanders would broadcast to the world, hence the concentration here on the village, the manor house and the standing stones. The sole nod to the island’s customs is the group of people lurking behind a wall. Another temptation would be to use the Nuada sun as seen in the film but others have already made use of that so I took a sun face from an old Tarot card.
As with the Milbury poster, this is now a design available on a range of CafePress products. These are mostly paper goods for the time being; setting up new shops at CafePress becomes increasingly time-consuming as the company adds more yet clothing, phone cases and household goods. Among the new products, however, there’s a stainless steel flask which I wouldn’t usually add but which is perfect for a design promoting a Scottish island. I think I’ll have to order one for myself.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Wicker mania
• Milbury souvenirs
• Children of the Stones
Beauty and the Beast.
British artist and designer Walter Crane never illustrated a Perrault collection but he did illustrate individual editions of Perrault’s more well-known tales. These illustrations are from collections published in 1911 of the small books of nursery rhymes, alphabets and stories for children that Crane produced in the 1870s. The clear-line drawings are unusual for their avoidance of the decor one usually sees with these stories; Crane admired the work of the Pre-Raphaelites but the settings are a lot less medieval than some of his other books, the architecture and costumes owing more to the Empire style.
The Frog Prince.
Crane wrote several design books, including a very good one about the history of book design. His drawings for children may be simple but they’re all very precise and often contain significant details; many of the larger compositions draw the eye into the background with views through doors or windows, or into remote vistas. Crane also adapted each story into verse, and even manages to represent an act of metamorphosis in a single picture for the moment when the Frog Prince turns human. Elsewhere some of the pages are almost comic-like in their arrangement of multiple panels and text.
The samples here are taken from three different collections:
Beauty and the Beast / The Frog Prince / The Hind in the Wood
Cinderella / Puss in Boots / Valentine and Orson
The Sleeping Beauty / The Baby’s Own Alphabet / Bluebeard
The Hind in the Wood.