A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
December (1732) by Jacob van Huysum.
Paintings of December often resemble Christmas cards so this small selection is an alternative to views of snow-covered fields. John William Buxton Knight’s painting does a better job of evoking the more common damp and dreary British winter.
Between Veneux and By – December Morning (1882) by Alfred Sisley.
Old December’s Bareness Everywhere (1908) by John William Buxton Knight.
The feature films of French animator René Laloux are the closest thing to cinematic equivalents of comics magazine Métal Hurlant. Laloux’s collaboration with Roland Topor, Fantastic Planet (1973), is familiar to Anglophone audiences but fewer people are aware of Time Masters (1982) and Gandahar (1988), two more science fiction films made with Moebius and Philippe Caza respectively. Time Masters looks marvellous but the story (based on a novel by Stefan Wul) lacks the strangeness of Fantastic Planet. Gandahar, based on a novel by Jean-Pierre Andrevon, I’ve yet to see but anyone searching for it should be aware that the version dubbed into English (and retitled The Light Years) dumped Gabriel Yared’s score, and had a sexual encounter censored by the usual rabble of prudish American producers.
The Captive (1988) continues the collaboration with Philippe Caza being a 7-minute adaptation of Caza’s comic story Equinoxe (1982). The music for this one is also by Gabriel Yared, and this copy at YouTube includes English subtitles. For comparison, the comic story is here. Of the two I prefer the comic but then I’ve always enjoyed Caza’s work.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Les Temps Morts by René Laloux
From Homosurrealism to Belgio-surrealism. Papillons de Nuit (1997) is a short homage to the Surrealist painter Paul Delvaux featuring a handful of familiar Delvaux motifs including nocturnal tramcars and large-eyed, bare-breasted women. Raoul Servais had already borrowed some of Delvaux’s imagery for his feature-length fantasy, Taxandria (1994), but that film doesn’t sustain itself over its running time despite the involvement of Alain Robbe-Grillet and François Schuiten. Servais’s blend of live action and animation seems to work better in concentrated doses.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Sirene by Raoul Servais
• Paul Delvaux: The Sleepwalker of Saint-Idesbald
• Harpya by Raoul Servais
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux
Untitled (2012) by Brian Oldham.
Jack Sanders was in touch recently about his online art showcase Homosurrealism, a gallery of homoerotics, the surreal and the occult. The fourth issue has just gone live, and the contents could just as well be described as Homo-occultism given the predominance of esoterica. Jean Cocteau and Kenneth Anger are in there, also William Burroughs via Gus Van Sant’s film of the Thanksgiving Prayer which receives a lot of exposure at this time of year.
La Petite Mort by John Waiblinger.
Also featured is my Sephiroth of the Great Old Ones from the Haunter of the Dark collection. Credit should be given there to Alan Moore who was responsible for the attribution of the various gods to the different spheres. In the book the chart is followed by my renderings of the sinister pantheon together with Alan’s description of each god and sphere.
The Great Old Ones: Sephiroth (1999) by John Coulthart & Alan Moore.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Salivation Army, a film by Scott Treleaven
“…it’s a shame there isn’t more of [Jean de Bosschère’s] idiosyncratic work at the Internet Archive,” I wrote in 2012. The reason that Bosschère’s books aren’t immediately to hand is that the Internet Archive has misspelled his name in many of their tags, not the first time that searches there are thwarted by errors or missing data (illustrators often go uncredited).
The City Curious (1920) is one of several books that Bosschère wrote and illustrated, this edition being translated into English by F. Tennyson Jesse. The whimsical story was presumably intended for children but Bosschère’s imagination is a peculiar one, and his figures are often so eccentric they need to be studied closely to pick out faces and limbs from their details and distortion. Eccentricity isn’t unknown in children’s stories but this one is much closer to Surrealism than the Surrealist’s favourite Lewis Carroll books. Many more of these illustrations may be browsed here or downloaded here.
