New Modofly books

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Steampunk: Life in Our New Century!

I’m behind on work updates again. Still being very productive on a range of different fronts—mostly book and CD design as usual—but the workload means that site updates tend to suffer. Anyway…

This new Steampunk illustration was a quick piece done at the weekend to accompany an article Jeff VanderMeer is writing. The collage came out better than expected considering it was pretty much slammed together in an afternoon. Coincidentally, the same weekend there was a request from Modofly for new designs to adorn their range of bespoke notebooks. The last Modofly design I produced was also a Steampunk one (depicting Jeff’s Steampunk formula) so I quickly worked this up into a new book design. I’ve also slightly reworked the Nyarlathotep design done earlier this year so it fits Modofly’s book format. When I get the time I’ll be making some Cafepress products from these designs; I’d like to see both of them as posters for a start.

Update: Jeff’s article, which includes two of my illustrations, is now posted here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos
• Steampunk Redux
• Steampunk framed
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts

The art of Michael Dotson

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Dream House #3 (2009).

Many of Michael Dotson‘s vivid acrylic paintings would make good illustrations for JG Ballard books or for some of his more hallucinatory short stories. Not all of these stylised urban landscapes and empty sports arenas have the requisite latent menace to be truly Ballardian but the anomalous black pyramid in Dream House #3 carries a weight of sinister implication. Pseunami (2005), meanwhile, depicts a vibrantly abstracted catastrophe.

Via Core 77.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ballard and the painters
• AVAF at Mao Mag

Le Phallus phénoménal

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Le Phallus phénoménal (1793–1794).

This blurred and discoloured picture arrives following a discussion with Paul Rumsey in the comments for an earlier post about engravings of monstrous whales. The pictures there were by engraver Hieronymus Cock whose surname gives us an additional resonance when discussing Moby Dick and sperm whales. The picture I posted of Jan Saenredam’s stranded whale showed the dead creature’s considerable penis (another engraving does the same) which led Paul to alert me to Dominique Vivant’s mischievous play on these pictures, where the artist exchanges the whale for a Brobdingnagian phallus. Or perhaps it’s merely a Gulliverian phallus and those people are Lilliputians… Whatever the case, I then mentioned to Paul JG Ballard’s story ‘The Drowned Giant’ from Ballard’s Terminal Beach collection which concerns the body of an enormous human found washed on a beach and subject to similar scrutiny by townspeople as in the stranded whale pictures. The body is eventually dissected and sold off. Paul reminded me of the end of the piece where Ballard writes:

As for the immense pizzle, this ends its days in the freak museum of a circus which travels up and down the north-west. This monumental apparatus, stunning in its proportions and sometime potency, occupies a complete booth to itself. The irony is that it is wrongly identified as that of a whale…

…which brings us full circle. Perhaps fittingly, Ballard’s story was published in Playboy magazine in 1965 under the title ‘Souvenir’.

As for Dominique Vivant (1747–1825), aka the Baron de Denon, his prestigious career besides engraving included, among other things, the directorship of the Louvre. We’re told he also wrote an erotic novel, Point de lendemain, and produced a selection of pornographic etchings, of which Le Phallus phénoménal would seem to be a part. Let no one accuse the French of being prudes; the picture above is from a site where you can order framed prints should you have a sudden urge to hang a phenomenal phallus on your wall.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales
• Jan Saenredam’s whale
• The Whale again
• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick
• Phallic bibelots
• Phallic worship
• The art of ejaculation