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Design by Randoll Coate for the Labirinto Borges, a hedge maze at the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice, which was renovated earlier this year. • “Code was probably our most overtly political record, which is interesting, touring and playing it in these very different but scary political times.”​ Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire talking about the experience of touring America again. • At The Daily Heller: A look at the work of designer/illustrator George Hardie whose five-decade career is to…

Paul Vincent Woodroffe (1875–1954) was a British illustrator and stained-glass artist, a kind of British equivalent of Harry Clarke in that he seems to have spent more time creating stained glass than he did illustrating books. Woodroffe was also an exact contemporary of Aubrey Beardsley, and both artists provided illustrations in 1897 for The Parade, a heavily-illustrated gift book of stories for children. I’ve known about Woodroffe’s illustrated Tempest for some time but I’ve had to wait to…

There’s a worthwhile documentary struggling to be born in this film which is compromised by its hyperbolic title and a running time of 48 minutes, not nearly enough to contain a history of science fiction, past and present. I’m not a media historian so I can’t say whether this was the first serious examination of written science fiction made for British TV but if it wasn’t there wouldn’t have been many that preceded it. It’s Fantastic! It’s Futuristic! It’s Fatalistic! It’s Science Fiction! was…

Cover design by Jim Jupp, art by Arik Roper. • New music: Sorcery by Belbury Poly, or “The Belbury Poly” as the credit on the cover art has it. The description of the forthcoming release says “it grew from [Jim] Jupp’s love of early to mid-80s electronic music and a rediscovery of how that music had soundtracked his childhood love of all things sci-fi and fantasy. It’s moody and melodramatic electronica rendered in bright and evocative 80s sounds.” And concerning the cover art there’s this:…

Mugwump (mŭg´ wŭmp). An Algonquin word meaning a chief; in Eliot’s Indian Bible the word “centurion” in the Acts is rendered mugwump. It is now applied in the United States to independent members of the Republican party, those who refuse to follow the dictum of a caucus, and all political Pharisees whose party vote cannot be relied on. —Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1954 Such is the usual explanation given for the origin of the word “mugwump”, a term better known today, of course,…

I was amused when I opened this new arrival to see a reproduction of the picture which is currently being used as this month’s blog header. The coincidence confirms that this is my kind of book, being a collection of paintings, drawings and engravings of the mysterious and recondite throughout the ages. The Art of the Unknown continues the format that S. Elizabeth began in 2020 with The Art of the Occult, then continued with The Art of Darkness and The Art of Fantasy. If you’ve followed any of…

Crivelli’s Room I (1967) by Gillian Ayers. • “This is the first film ever made about HP Lovecraft—and almost no one has seen it. Shot in 1989–90, it features unique interviews with Lovecraft’s friends and colleagues. It has sat unfinished for more than thirty-five years. We need your help to complete it and release it for the first time.” Lovecraft: When the Stars are Right, a documentary directed by Seán Martin, is asking for funding assistance to help digitise the extant footage. Watch the…

Giving this 30-minute curio a “film by…” designation is a bit of a stretch but it was co-written by artist Mati Klarwein and also directed by him. Milik was filmed among the towns and desert landscapes of Niger in 1972, and is a rambling thing that’s not easy to comprehend if you’re trying to do so while the all-French voiceover is being haltingly auto-translated. The film was a creation of members of the Deyá art community in Mallorca where Mati Klarwein spent his later years. The scenario is…

1955. Cover art by Jane Sinnickson Flora. The programme for the symphony (1845 version) by Hector Berlioz: Part One: Daydreams, Passions The author imagines that a young musician, afflicted by the sickness of spirit which a famous writer has called the vagueness of passions (le vague des passions), sees for the first time a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her. By a strange anomaly, the beloved image never…

Total solar eclipse over Zaragoza, Spain, 12th August, 2026. Photograph by Ruiyu Zhang. • Kenneth Anger (again), in a transcript for another KPFA radio interview, in which we Anger have mentioning HP Lovecraft. Not a major revelation in itself but it’s not something I’ve seen before. On a related note, Anger wrote to August Derleth in 1947 asking permission to adapt The Dreams in the Witch House for one of his films. Another tantalising might-have-been from the Anger filmography, along with his…

Arthur Machen isn’t usually considered to be a Decadent author even though it was in the Mauve Decade of the 1890s that he first established himself as a writer. Machen knew Oscar Wilde well enough to recount an anecdote in later life, and two of Machen’s earliest books were published with covers designed by Aubrey Beardsley. But Machen outlived Wilde and Beardsley and all the other writers and artists who expired prematurely around the turn of the century, while Machen’s 20th-century stories…

San Francisco Oracle, Vol. 1 No. 7, February 1967. In his later years Kenneth Anger often seemed to spend more time giving interviews than making films, even though he was keeping busy when out of the public eye. Most of the discussions cover familiar ground, recycling anecdotes about the creation of the Magick Lantern Cycle, and the people who contributed to the films. More interesting—and harder to find—are interviews from the time when Anger was still at work on his magnum opus, which is why…

An illustration by Charles Keeping for The Golden Shadow. • At the BFI: Alex Ramon selects 10 great British TV shows of 1976. (And 50 years ago the American term “shows” was most often applied to the variety format. We would have called these “programmes”.) • Illustrations by Charles Keeping for The Golden Shadow (1973), a retelling of Greek myths and legends by Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen. • All The Devils are here: Ken Russell’s controversial masterpiece will return to cinemas in its…

Since Barry Windsor-Smith was absent from the previous post (or there in spirit via the pages of The Studio) I thought I’d post a few of his prints from the mid-70s. As I said in the Snaps piece, Smith and co. set up The Studio in order to concentrate on art that was creator-owned and free of the constraints they were forced to work under in the comics field. This didn’t mean that they completely abandoned the subjects which had made them popular artists. Barry Smith’s work for his own…

I’d been hoping that Malcolm Whitehead’s Snaps might be made public eventually, and here it is, a 25-minute film documenting the northern end of a British book-signing tour undertaken by three artists and their publisher in October 1979. Not only that, there’s also this shorter compilation of footage that didn’t make the final cut. The artists were three of the four whose work is showcased in the book known as The Studio: Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Mike Kaluta and Bernie Wrightson. The other…

Drawing Hands (1948) by MC Escher. • New music: The World In Layers by mōshonsensu; The Rest Is My Ghost by Lawrence English; Rotostyles by Julien Ash & M.Nomized. • At Public Domain Review: “The Persian Mâr-Nâmeh or, The Book for Taking Omens from Snakes” (1892). • At Little White Lies: Sam Moore writes in praise of Hiroshi Teshigahara, “surveyor of the abyss”. Paradoxically, art is useful only if it is allowed to remain entirely useless—that is, entirely free to go where it will. Wilde finds…

As an artist, Leonor Fini has never received as much attention as her contemporary and near namesake Leonora Carrington but this didn’t stop film-makers calling at Fini’s door in later life. The best of the ones I’ve seen to date (and probably the best of all) is the feature-length documentary made by Chris Vermorcken in 1987 but there are many other short ones, several of which were made for television. Fini worked as a costume designer for the theatre and later for film which may have helped…

It’s that man again, or some of his progeny, infecting the world with their nightmares. Lovecraft’s Brood is a story collection edited by Ellen Datlow, a kind of follow-up to Lovecraft’s Monsters, although the new book is a more expansive take on the Lovecraftian weird tale. As with the earlier collection, I designed and illustrated this one throughout. The illustrations were more of a challenge this time since the stories weren’t always focused on explicitly physical threats; or if they were,…

The Toad of Maldoror (1932) by Valentine Hugo. • Old music: Thank You America (John Robie Dub Mix) by Cabaret Voltaire. Code, the group’s 1987 debut for the Parlophone label, receives an overdue reissue later this year with a substantial collection of remixes. • At Lesser-Known Writers: Douglas A. Anderson examines the career of Hal Garrott, a writer whose novels for children feature fine illustrations by Dugald Stewart Walker and Mary-Ponton Gardner. • The August catalogue of lots for the…

It’s the magus of Utopia Parkway again. As the title suggests, Cornell, 1965 was shot in the 1960s, although the footage wasn’t assembled as a film until 1978 when director Lawrence Jordan added his narration and a Debussy soundtrack. Jordan had been Joseph Cornell’s assistant in the 1960s, and his footage was meant to document details in the workroom where Cornell made so many of his boxes. The details are mostly of the boxes that didn’t get sent to the galleries, half-finished or damaged…

Charles Henri Ford’s avant-garde magazine has been a sporadic visitor to these pages over the past 20 years, the subject of occasional posts as well as my complaints about the difficulties of finding online sources for important magazines and journals. The difficulties are now over where View is concerned…or almost over because this cache is an incomplete run, with the last seven issues absent. That still gives us 30 complete issues to look through, however, so I’ll temper my complaints. The…

Imaginary Numbers (1954) by Yves Tanguy. • “In all his writing, Ballard seems to embrace the opposed extremes of pulp genre conventions on the one hand and avant-garde experimentation on the other, while entirely rejecting the norms of conventional literary fiction that lie between these two extremes.” Steven Shaviro reviewing The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of JG Ballard by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan. • The Naturalist’s Library: A complete digital edition of William…

I like a picture series, and this is one I hadn’t encountered before. Dorothea Tanning’s Les 7 périls spectraux (1950) is a portfolio of seven lithograph prints with accompanying text, “Pourquoi Rester Muets?”, by André Pieyre de Mandiargues. Of the series, the artist had this to say: My first lithograph adventure has become a book. An album with seven perils in it. Because to the seven deadly sins I preferred the seven spectral perils, life being more perilous than sinful. What we don’t…

Yes, it’s that Jim Henson but you won’t find any Muppets here. The Cube was an hour-long TV play made in 1969 for NBC Experiment in Television, a series with a contents list that shows the US channel making a break from the conservatism and formula-chasing that’s always dogged the medium. Henson co-wrote The Cube with Jerry Juhl, and directed the play himself. The scenario is the kind of thing you’d be more likely to find in an animated film: an unnamed man (Richard Schaal) inside a room-sized…

Amethyst geode by Sheila Sund. • RIP Tony Rayns: A Supreme Cinephile Remembered – notes and observations by Geoff Andrew. The remembrance mentions Rayns’ Cinema Rising, a short-lived magazine he was editing in the 1970s. I posted an extract from the first issue here. • The week in photo competitions: Hasselblad Masters 2026; ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2026 shortlist; International Aerial Photographer of the Year. • At Colossal: Veks Van Hillik suspends fish, insects, and other…

Phantom Canyon (2006) is another short animated film by Stacey Steers where many of the backgrounds and other details are collaged pieces from old engravings. There are so many of these films by Steers and older directors like Lawrence Jordan that I’m starting to think they should be considered a sub-genre inside the general body of film animation, just as engraving collage is almost a separate class of paper collage. In Stacey Steers’ The Edge of Alchemy the human character was animated from…

The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kiso Kaidō is a ukiyo-e print series by Keisai Eisen and Utagawa Hiroshige depicting notable places on one of the main roads leading from Edo (Tokyo) to Kyoto. A modern-day version of the series by Katsuyuki Nishijima follows a similar route (as much as it still exists) showing some of the old buildings seen along the way. Nishijima’s prints have heavier lines than you find in their 19th-century equivalents but few of his scenes look immediately contemporary. In…

Tree Shadows on the Park Wall, Roundhay, Leeds (1872) by John Atkinson Grimshaw. • “In many cases, the rules of physics that apply in a real scene appear to be optional in a painting; they can be obeyed or ignored at the discretion of the artist to enhance the painting’s intended effect.” An extract from The Visual World of Shadows by Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh, in which the authors examine some of the rule-breaking that takes place when artists are dealing with shadows in paintings. I…

Good books about gargoyles aren’t easy to find but this one, edited by Lester Burbank Bridaham, is better than many I’ve seen. Gargoyles, Chimeres, and the Grotesque in French Gothic Sculpture was published in 1930, and is mostly a collection of photographs, with the text kept to a minimum at the front of the book. The nature of the subject—eroded soot-stained sculptures seen against eroded soot-stained walls—doesn’t always help the photographer but the book makes up in quantity what it lacks…

A new piece of work which I completed recently, this is a poster for a short film, Stone Elegy, written and directed by Shane Smith. The film is a drama set in Ireland during the Iron Age, with a narrative that encompasses lost love, armed conflict and a touch of magic. The brief from Thin Veil Pictures was for something in the style of the cover I created for Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire, a window-like frame of multiple panels in which various figures and details from the story could be…