Animal Instinct: Raging Bull
David Thomson revisits Scorsese’s masterpiece.
Felix D’Eon
Dancer by Felix D’Eon at his Flickr pages. His artwork based on the photos, including some gay erotica, can be seen at his website.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dancers by John Andresen
• Youssef Nabil
• Images of Nijinsky
• The art of Hubert Stowitts, 1892–1953
The art of Maleonn Ma
Portrait of Mephisto #1 (2006).
Portrait of Mephisto #5 (2006).
The carefully-constructed and coloured tableaux of Shanghai-based art Maleonn Ma remind me of Joel-Peter Witkin‘s grainier and nastier works only without the body parts or dead babies. The repeated use of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam in contemporary culture is a whole subject in itself.
Via Phantasmaphile.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Behold the (naked) man
• Sculptural collage: Eduardo Paolozzi
• Michelangelo revisited
In the hands of FATE
One of my works graces the cover of an American institution this month with the appearance of my HP Lovecraft portrait on the August issue of FATE magazine (volume 60, number 8, issue 688, if you must know). This is for an article about Lovecraft’s occult connections and I believe they’ve also used one of my views of R’lyeh for the article itself although I can’t confirm this just now.
This is the third time my work has appeared in FATE (like TIME, the magazine prefers to see its name in caps). The first occasion was for another Lovecraft feature about Cthulhu in (I think) 1999. Then in 2000 I was commissioned to produce the illustration above for an article on “sky predators” which led me to plunder once again Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature, a wonderful book I’ve frequently swiped from when in need of organic weirdness.
A couple of years later this picture was featured in a Fox TV documentary of all things, part of a post X-Files series called Conspiracy Theory. The subject was “flying rods”, one of the less convincing manifestations of cryptozoological phenomena, and the program needed some antique pictures to back up their thin veneer of evidence. They rather scurrilously used my picture to illustrate flying rod history as though this was a Victorian illustration, not a piece of Photoshop work. Fox documentaries, like their news channel, seem to have a flexible approach to the truth.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• New things for June
• Le horreur cosmique
Crossed destinies revisted
Difficult Loves (1985).
Today’s book purchase was another in the Picador run of Italo Calvino titles with covers by the Brothers Quay, this particular volume being a collection of the author’s early short stories. I wrote about the Quay’s contribution to book design back in February and their covers remain one of many reasons to keep haunting the local charity shops, especially when their designs are superior to those of more recent editions.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The Quay Brothers archive