A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Gay
Kristopher photographed by David Belisle.
A little something for the 14th; I can always be relied on to post some gore for Valentine’s Day. I was tempted to post this still from Bride of Re-Animator but it’s a bit excessive for something so frivolous. Ephraim Lilien’s drawing shows that the bleeding love heart isn’t such a recent idea.
Illustration by EM Lilien for Jugend, 1900.
Celebrating nine years of interests, obsessions and passing enthusiasms. As before, a look at the annual delivery of stats from WordPress is instructive.
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 970,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 42 days for that many people to see it.
The busiest day of the year was August 30th with 4,215 views. The most popular post that day was Index, fist or manicule?
Most posts here hit between 2,500 to 3,000 visits a day although the annual total is down on last year. I have Google stats indexing this site but I can never be bothered logging in to see how they compare. WordPress has the advantage of delivering stats to your blogging dashboard.
These are the posts that got the most views in 2014.
1 The art of NoBeast June 2007
2 The art of Thomas Eakins, 1844–1916 March 2006
3 The art of Takato Yamamoto June 2007
4 Gekko Hayashi revisited December 2012
5 The art of Oliver Frey July 2009
The gay art posts always beat everything else, and NoBeast is the most popular post for another year. Russia’s current crop of authoritarian goons may regard gay sex as horribly un-Russian but NoBeast gets consistently heavy traffic from VK, the Russian social network.
The top referring sites in 2014 were:
1. twitter.com
2. facebook.com
3. ficbook.net
4. pinterest.com
5. mentalfloss.com
Twitter and Facebook referrals are all very well but the way they hide what people are looking at means they’re no help to people running websites. Anyway, thanks as always for reading, referring and commenting! Here’s a few musical nines:
• If 6 Was 9 (1967) by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
• Nine Feet Underground (1971) by Caravan
• Nine Moons In Alaska (1971) by Beaver & Krause
• Party 9 (1973) by Faust
• Katzenmusik 9 (1979) by Michael Rother
First Eyes (1982).
I’ve emphasised the artist label to distinguish this Mel Odom from the very prolific writer of the same name. The artist received a fleeting mention here in the Gay artists archive but for many years he’s been a highly regarded book and magazine illustrator, with a Gold Medal from the American Society of Illustrators among his accolades. (By coincidence, one of his covers was for an Ellen Datlow horror collection, and I happen to be illustrating a new Ellen Datlow collection of horror stories this week.) More recently Odom has gained a very different audience for his doll designs which are mentioned in passing below. I’m grateful again to John Wisniewski for offering me this piece. Thanks to John and to Mel, more of whose gorgeous art can be seen at his website.
*
John Wisniewski: When did you begin drawing and painting?
Mel Odom: I’ve been drawing since I was about 4 years old and painting since my early teens. I have scribbles in an early picture book of mine that I’m sure were my first attempts at drawing.
JW: Whom are some of your favorite artists?
MO: I like so many different artists. The Pre-Raphelites were a huge influence on me as well as artists like Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keefe. Aubrey Beardsley has been an early and constant favorite of mine. Representational art moves me more than the abstract for the most part. Disney animation also shaped what I still think of as being beautiful.
JW: Have you had any exhibitions? If so, what was the reaction to your work?
MO: I’ve really never had a one-man exhibition. When I was illustrating I was too busy to bother and illustration was not considered gallery worthy. Then when I quit illustrating to create Gene [Marshall] there was simply no time to even consider it. I’ve been in tons of group shows where the reaction has been everything from adoring to dismissive. I’ve been working on a series of oil paintings towards a show.
JW: Your work is easily recognizable to those in the art world, Mel. Did you expect this to happen, when you began?
MO: When I started out I knew my drawings didn’t look like anyone else’s, but it wasn’t a conscious ploy for recognition. I devised my style by the process of elimination. I knew what I didn’t want them to look like. I just drew with a vision that made me need to see what the drawing looked like completed. My drawings were always based on a very personal sense of beauty.
Hello, I Lied (1997).
Birth of a Zimbu by Christopher Schulz is another addition to the growing collection of artworks based on William Burroughs’ The Wild Boys (1971), in this case a 52-page collection of “visual reveries made from collaged parts of dated gay porn, ancient ruins, and other various unrelated sources.” The book costs $10 and may be previewed and ordered here.
The Zimbus are Burroughs’ solution to the problem of reproduction (or regeneration) among the Wild Boys, his army of eternal teenage boys at war with the world at large in a dystopian 1988. Warfare means casualties so in order to maintain their homosocial, homoerotic tribal existence they gather at special times to perform sex-magic rituals that summon the “Zimbu” spirit forms of dead Wild Boys. The Zimbus are incarnated as new Wild Boys after being inseminated and fully materialised.
Burroughs wasn’t short on fantastic concepts but his ideas are often delivered and dismissed in a few lines. By contrast, the creation of the Zimbus is given pages of detailed description, the separatist, semi-human world of the Wild Boys being one to which he devoted a great deal of imaginative attention. I’ve linked before to Phil Hine’s essay, Zimbu Xototl Time, which examines the Zimbu idea at some length, drawing comparisons to similar ideas in anthropology and other fiction. If I ever get round to finished the long-gestating Wild Boys portfolio I may be able to show some Zimbu manifestations of my own.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The William Burroughs archive
MMOB :: Far West (2013) by Alison Scarpulla.
• “…although same-sex love is as old as love itself, the public discourse around it, and the political movement to win rights for it, arose in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This message may surprise those who believe that gay identity came of age in London and New York, sometime between the Oscar Wilde trials and the Stonewall riots.” Alex Ross reviewing Robert Beachy’s Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity. Beachy talks about his book here.
• “I was in a room with tube synthesizers, where you had to tune them up to play them. It was unbelievable.” John Carpenter talking to Joseph Stannard about composing with electronics. Carpenter’s album of new music, Lost Themes, may be previewed here.
• From 2010: John Ridpath on Mervyn Peake’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland. Related: “The most twisted version of Alice in Wonderland you’ll ever see.”
I was brought up in a world where art was something owned and insured—usually inherited: but seldom if ever made by anyone one I knew.
I had an early inkling that there was fun to be had over the hill, like the feeling when faced with a sunset that someone’s throwing a mega awesome party just beyond the nearest cloud, and I set off to join the caravan. Let’s just say I was in search of company, headed towards the glow, and I found it.
Tilda Swinton‘s speech at the Rothko Chapel
• “Her art often touches on alchemy and magic; and in her memoir of insanity she writes of misreading an Imperial Chemicals sign as ‘chemistry and alchemy’.” Charlotte Higgins on Leonora Carrington.
• Shadows Over Main Street, an anthology of small-town Lovecraftian terror, is out this week from Hazardous Press. 20 stories and poems plus interior illustrations including a contribution of my own.
• “With Fantastic Planet, I felt torn about using it, because it’s…the title of an animated film.” Guitarist Sarah Lipstate, aka Noveller, talks to Ned Raggett about her new album.
• Jim Jupp of Belbury Poly and the Ghost Box record label answers 15 questions.
• A DeLorean driving through a Tron cityscape: Retrowave by Florian Renner.
• Powell & Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann (1951) has been restored.
• Music from Forbidden Planet (1956) by Louis & Bebe Barron | The Four Horsemen (1972) by Aphrodite’s Child | Assault on Precinct 13 (Main Theme) (1976) by John Carpenter