A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Painting
left: Safe n Sane; right: Larky.
A pair of paintings by German artist Ralf Paschke whose speciality—if it wasn’t already obvious—is male bondage. I’m fascinated by the single-mindedness at work here, some of the leather close-ups verge on the abstract. Vigorous and unsentimental stuff.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bad Behaviour
Beach Day.
Two new archive additions for the price of one today via artist and photographer Felix D’Eon. These are from his Flickr pages but there’s more work on his website, from sketches to scenes of dreamy homoerotica.
Man with Sword.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
• The recurrent pose archive
• The men with swords archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Felix D’Eon
left: “Hippies in a psychedelic coffee shop“, San Francisco, 1967; right: “Pair of long-haired Londoners in a psychedelic corner of the Beatles’ Apple boutique“, London, 1968.
A few of the photos which turn up when searching for pictures of the psychedelic era at Google’s LIFE archives.
Jours de Lenteur (1937) by Yves Tanguy.
Behind it, the ark of his covenant, stood two photographs in a hinged blackwood frame. On the left was a snapshot of himself at the age of four, sitting on a lawn between his parents before their divorce. On the right, exorcizing this memory, was a faded reproduction of a small painting he had clipped from a magazine, ‘Jours de Lenteur’ by Yves Tanguy. With its smooth, pebble-like objects, drained of all associations, suspended on a washed tidal floor, this painting had helped to free him from the tiresome repetitions of everyday life. The rounded milky forms were isolated on their ocean bed like the houseboat on the exposed bank of the river.
The Drought (1965).
Following my observations yesterday about Ballard’s Surrealist influences, this post seems inevitable. By no means a comprehensive listing, these are merely some of Ballard’s many art references retrieved after a quick browse through the bookshelves earlier. I’d forgotten about the Böcklin reference in The Crystal World. The Surrealist influence in Ballard’s fiction is obvious to even a casual reader, less obvious is the subtle influence of the Surrealist’s precursors, the Symbolists. André Breton frequently enthused over Gustave Moreau‘s airless impasto visions and many of Ballard’s remote femmes fatales owe as much to Moreau’s paintings as they do to Paul Delvaux. The Symbolist connection was finally confirmed for me when RE/Search published their landmark JG Ballard in 1984; there among the list of books on his library shelves was that cult volume of mine, Dreamers of Decadence by Philippe Jullian.