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The art of Robert Sherer

American Martyr.

The Sebastian-esque piece above is a pyrograph by American artist Robert Sherer. Pyrographs—pictures burned onto wood—aren’t very common here but are a fixture of craft classes at US summer camps. Sherer adopts the medium to subvert the wholesome orthodoxies of American life, that side of America which persistently stigmatises minorities as “other”, and to resurrect and explore his memories of youthful feelings for other boys.

Newborn.

“Stigma” is an apt word when discussing Sherer’s work. His paintings in the Male Nudes series, of which Newborn (above) is a part, have suffered censorship at the hands of those who found their representations of men in the postures of traditional female nudes to be bizarrely unacceptable. (The tribulations are detailed here.) Then there’s his Blood Works series of symbolic botanical illustrations—some of which are entitled Stigmata—which use HIV+ blood as a medium to explore “the complexities of romantic life and sexual attraction in the HIV era.” The challenge of these works to the viewer makes a considerable change from the usual parade of undressed men which comprise the majority of work by male artists dealing with gay themes.

Condo.

• Robert Sherer slideshow at GLBTQ
• Robert Sherer at Lyman-Eyer

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Haeckel fractals

In which Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature are given the Mandelbrot treatment. The example above is one of a number of variations created using the splendid Gorgon-headed Starfish, a creature I’ve messed with myself a couple of times.

These fractal images have been created by the Subblue people using their Fractal Explorer plug-in for Adobe’s Pixel Bender Toolkit, both of which are free downloads. I’ve not had chance to play around properly with Pixel Bender but the results here make it seem worth spending time getting to grips with its rather primitive interface.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ernst Haeckel, Christmas card artist

Gays are being attacked – but we’re holding hands, heads held high

The Red Book by Carl Jung

This month is a major one in book publishing as Carl Jung’s magnum opus The Red Book, or Liber Novus, which has remained unpublished for 80 years, is issued in a facsimile edition. Selections of pages have been turning up in reviews and online previews which easily whet the appetite.

In his late 30s, Jung started writing a book called The Red Book. The Red Book is part journal, part mythological novel that takes the reader through Jung’s fantasies — hallucinations he self-induced to try and get to the core of his unconscious. … The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings. (More.)

Jung maintained a lifelong fascination with alchemical symbolism and many of these pages resemble the kind of plates one finds in alchemical treatises such as the Splendor Solis, if that book had also contained additions from William Blake and Hildegard von Bingen. The only drawback is the price: at £120 this isn’t a casual purchase, but then this is over 400 pages of full-colour at a big size, 45.7 x 30.5 x 5.1 cm. Time to start petitioning rich relatives for Christmas.

• The Holy Grail of the Unconscious

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Julien Champagne, 1877–1932
• Digital alchemy
• In the Shadow of the Sun by Derek Jarman

Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar

So I had a bright idea at the end of September… Instead of rehashing old work for a CafePress calendar design, I thought I’d try something new. I hadn’t done any artwork for myself all year, everything I’d been working on was a commission of some sort. In addition to that, I’d spent a large portion of the year delving deeper into the psychedelic music of the late Sixties, especially the wealth of obscure British bands to be found on the seemingly endless series of compilations which have trickled out over the past two decades. Everyone is familiar with Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit but, as I’ve noted before, themes from, and allusions to, the Alice books run through British psychedelia to an even greater degree. The Beatles put Lewis Carroll in their pantheon of influences on the cover of Sgt. Pepper, and Wonderland’s atmosphere of Victorian surrealism chimed perfectly with a resurgence of interest in Victorian art and design.

So at the end of September, mulling over ideas, I picked up one of my Lewis Carroll volumes and looked at the chapter list: 12 chapters…12 months…I could do a psychedelic Alice in Wonderland! The only drawback was being weighed down by ongoing work which meant that anything I did would have to be created quickly and easily. I reckoned it was manageable if I put a few rules in place first: try and rough out a chapter a day; make copious use of clip art decoration and scanned engravings; keep things bold and florid without worrying too much about fidelity to minor story points. In theory I could do the whole thing in about two weeks if I kept on schedule. As it turns out the whole thing took me three weeks as I got increasingly involved with illustrating the story. You can see the results below and larger copies of the pictures here. Two years ago I was saying I probably wouldn’t ever illustrate Lewis Carroll. That was true at the time since I couldn’t find an approach to the stories that would sustain my interest and (possibly) bring something new to the books. Seeing Alice’s adventures through the psychotropic prism of the late Sixties showed me the way into Wonderland. What’s needed now is to do the same next year for Looking-Glass Land. Watch this space.

Some notes on the pictures follow below.

Update: By popular demand, this calendar is now available again.

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