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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…

Narcissus (1881) by Gyula Benczúr. • AnOther reposts an old interview with Dennis Bell of the Bob Mizer Foundation to coincide with an exhibition of homoerotic drawings from Physique Pictorial at JW Anderson Soho, London. The drawings by the pseudonymous (and still unidentified) “Spartacus” don’t bear comparison to those by Mizer’s celebrated discovery, Tom of Finland, but they’re part of a pioneering history. There’s more “Spartacus” at Wallpaper*. • “Ever the deviant, Bidgood initiated a…

More monochrome cosmic horror. Quiet Apocalypse is a short black-and-white film by “Insolitum”, a combination CGI with stock footage that nods to Cloverfield, Ishirō Honda’s monstrous menagerie, and the last few minutes of The Mist, if that particular film had continued beyond its abrupt ending. “Made using Blender, Zbrush, Substance Painter, After Effects and Davinci Resolve. Stock footage provided by Envato, Pexels and Pixabay,” says the YT note. Most of the visuals are self-explanatory and…

The legend of Yig, Father of Serpents, remained figurative no longer, and I started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth. — The Whisperer in Darkness Another month, another Lovecraftian portrait. Yig was the last of the Photoshop melanges from 1999 that I felt a need to replace for the new edition of The Haunter of the Dark, which means that the whole of the Great Old Ones section of…

Kites of Fukuroi and Distant View of Akiba in Totomi Province, from the series One Hundred Famous Views in the Various Provinces (1859) by Utagawa Hiroshige II. • Coming soon from Strange Attractor: International Freak: Robin Farquharson and the Dream of Psychedelic Revolt by M. Syd Rosen. • At the Daily Heller: the Brooklyn Botanical Garden looks back at the psychedelic Sixties with Flower Power. • At the BFI: Sophia Satchell-Baeza selects 10 great queer American underground features of the…

Who were Heinrichs and Bachmann? That’s a good question because neither I nor anyone else who’s written about their book covers can offer any more information beyond their names and the dates when they were active. What we do know is that from the mid-60s to an unspecified point in the 1970s Heinrichs and Bachmann’s studio was credited with many cover designs for books published by Heyne in Germany. By the 1980s the studio was still working for Heyne but with a credit now changed to Atelier…

The Quantel Paintbox was one of the first computer systems designed to create and manipulate digital graphics in a manner that was much closer to painting and drawing than computer programming. The technology was launched in 1981, and was essentially Photoshop ten years before Adobe Inc. announced its own image-editing system. Rather like the Fairlight CMI, being a pioneer had its disadvantages for Quantel, one of them being the enormous expense of the Paintbox system. Photoshop was never…

A Bigger Splash (1967) by David Hockney. • I was interviewed this week at Retrofuturista, the first interview I’ve done in a while, and more wide-ranging than they sometimes are. Subjects covered include illustration, design, weird fiction, the Reverbstorm comics, the Bumper Book of Magic, underground culture, and the deficiencies of AI art. Also my ongoing, mostly unseen, Axiom project. • At Nautilus: Kristen French conducts a lengthy and fascinating interview with Andrew Gallimore and Donald…

After mentioning Salvador Dalí in the previous post, here’s the man himself in a UK TV profile from 1973. I wouldn’t usually return to something like this but for years the only copy of Hello Dali! on YouTube was spoiled by having been recorded with a ghosted signal. The new copy isn’t perfect either, the sound is rather dull but this can be improved if you download the thing and watch it using VLC with the equalizer boosting the top end. Instead of writing a new description I’ll repost the one…

A Tab in the Ocean (1972) by Nektar. This is another post in which I refer to Franz Rottensteiner’s The Fantasy Book: The Ghostly, the Gothic, the Magical, the Unreal (Thames & Hudson, 1978) as a source of discovery. Rottensteiner is Austrian which no doubt explains why his study of fantasy and horror in art and fiction had a broader reach than you would have found in a similar study from a British or American editor. Some of the writers whose work he discusses—Stefan Grabiński, for…

Tony Hyde’s original artwork for the front cover of Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music by Hawkwind. The painting is being auctioned later this month. • At the Daily Heller: Steven Heller reprints his 2012 Atlantic review of The Graphic Canon, a three-volume collection of visual adaptations of works of literature. The collection was edited by the late Russ Kick, and includes my own condensation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. • At Dennis Cooper’s: Bill Hsu presents…21st Century Nightmares: Dark…

A new book arrived in the post this week. Rhino Head is a collection of words (in both German and English) by Carlos Atanes and drawings by Jan van Rijn which describes itself thus: This illustrated fantastical narrative consists of 21 chapters and features short, self-contained stories told from shifting narrative and temporal perspectives. It is a collaboration between author/director Carlos Atanes and illustrator Jan van Rijn, and explores the realms of eroticism and magical realism. What…

Book of the Three Dragons is an unusual illustrated volume, being an American edition of a retelling of Welsh myths by a Welsh writer, Kenneth Morris, with illustrations by a Hungarian artist, Ferdinand Huszti Horvath (1891–1973). Morris was, among other things, a Theosophist who was living in California when he wrote Book of the Three Dragons which no doubt explains the American publication. There doesn’t appear to be any Theosophy in this book at least. Dragons are an important symbol for the…

Dark Corridor (1990s) by Unknown Artist. • “I greatly enjoyed this rich, allusive and strange text, which has affinities to the literary form and style of TS Eliot, David Jones and Iain Sinclair, uniting high modernism with demotic and pulp elements, as well as to the occult thrillers of Charles Williams, Mary Butts and others.” Mark Valentine reviews B-Movie: Serial of Seven Stars by Andrew Duncan. • New music: Electronic Meditation For Inner Space Travel by Studio Kosmische; Fathom Tides by…

Coming soon from Absinthe Books, the novella imprint of PS Publishing, is Steal Me by Helen Grant, a book for which I created the wraparound cover art: Rowan Byrne hasn’t stolen anything for ages—not since she started to straighten her life out after a personal tragedy. But the volume she’s just picked up in the new bookshop in town seems to want her to steal it. The text is very persuasive. There’s a book for everyone in Legends—a book that will encourage their worst impulses. Steal. Fear.…

I found time recently to finish another picture for the revised edition of my Lovecraft book, a picture which I almost completed several months ago then had to set aside. Last year’s steady progress on the book’s production was brought to a halt in December as a result of a substantial and time-consuming illustration commission. I can’t complain—the new work was welcome after a rather fallow year—but it left me with none of the spare time I usually try and allot to personal projects. The latest…

Black Hole Accretion Disk Visualization by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman. • The summer catalogue of lots for the After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn, etc. • New music: The Sanctity Of Rust by Hollan Holmes; Heavy Water by Magic Tuber Stringband; Sorry I Didn’t Realize by iNFO. • In another of those foolhardy numbered lists, Alexis Petridis attempts to rank Laurie Anderson’s greatest songs. “The best of mathematics is a way…

The Epic of Gilgamesh isn’t a natural choice for the subject of a short animated film, but that’s what we have here, the first directorial effort by Czech film-maker and TV director Pavel Aujezdský. I’ve never read the Sumerian saga so I’m in no position to judge the success of Aujezdský’s adaptation, but given the strange and confusing nature of the opening scenes I’d guess it helps to be acquainted with the story. The scenes that follow are more straightforward, depicting a journey by the…

UK, 2009. Newton leaned forward, putting his elbows carefully on the table. “Nathan. Nathan. I was afraid of you then. I am afraid now. I have been afraid of all manner of things every moment I have spent on this planet, on this monstrous, beautiful, terrifying planet with all its strange creatures and its abundant water, and all of its human people. I am afraid now. I will be afraid to die here.” Before my recent rewatch of The Man Who Fell to Earth I decided to read the novel in order to…

Plakat Secesyjny (1971), a poster by Hubert Hilscher for an exhibition of Art Nouveau graphics. • At Public Domain Review: Longitude by Way of Wounded Hounds: Kenelm Digby’s Sympathetick Powder (1669 edition). Two subjects familiar to readers of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. • Miles Davis and group (Dave Liebman, Pete Cosey, Reggie Lucas, Michael Henderson, Al Foster, James Mtume) live in Stockholm in 1973. TV footage, 56 minutes. • At the BFI: Rory Doherty selects ten great films about…