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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…

A minor entry in the Nicolas Roeg filmography that few people will have seen. In March 2001 the BBC broadcast four 15-minute films that the corporation had commissioned for an occasional arts strand, Sound on Film. Each episode featured a new piece of music by a living composer, with visual accompaniment by four very different directors. Pilgrimage was directed by Werner Herzog with music by John Taverner; The New Math was directed by Hal Hartley with music by Louis Andriessen; In Absentia was…

Japan, 1998. I’m currently in the middle of a Nicolas Roeg rewatch season after acquiring a blu-ray of the recently reissued Castaway, Roeg’s 1986 adaptation of Lucy Irvine’s memoir (which shouldn’t be confused with 2000’s Cast Away). In the early 1980s when I was becoming more acquainted with his films I went through a phase of buying film posters, and managed to pick up copies of the UK quad sheets for Don’t Look Now and Bad Timing. I would have preferred the one for The Man Who Fell to Earth…

In the Constellation of Pisces by Adolf Hoffmeister. • “Comb through many of the numerous ‘greatest post-punk albums of all time’ lists that you’ll find dotted around the internet and one fairly continual omission is Thirst, which is something of a travesty. It’s difficult to think of many albums that embody the more pioneering and progressive elements of the post-punk spirit than Thirst.” Daniel Dylan Wray on the early, anarchic performances of Clock DVA. • Warner Brothers have decided at long…

Léonard Rosenthal’s follow-up to In the Kingdom of the Pearl was this volume with illustrations by Léon Carré. In the Garden of Gems was published in 1924 in an edition that matches the earlier book for page layout, print quality and decoration. The illustrator, Léon Carré (1878–1942), was more of a painter than a book illustrator, being one of the many Orientalist artists that France produced in the 19th century. Given the quality of his illustrations it’s a shame he didn’t work on more books,…

An unusual commission for Edmund Dulac, being a work of non-fiction published in France in 1920, with a British edition following in the same year. The author, Léonard Rosenthal, was a French diamond merchant who wrote a handful of books intended to celebrate and promote his line of business, of which this was the first. In the Kingdom of the Pearl is a history of the pearl-fishing trade and the use of pearls in jewellery, decoration and storytelling. I can’t vouch for the text but the book…

Visitation (1976) by Gilbert Williams. • “It’s the perfect storm of a UFO case.” Daniel Lavelle explores the Rendlesham Forest mystery of 1980, Britain’s own answer to the Roswell Incident. The case has more substantial documentation than most close encounters but it also has its share of conflicting reports, claims and interpretations. The truth is out there but it’s not evenly distributed. • The Science of Spooky Sounds: Kristen French talks to researcher Rodney Schmaltz about his theory that…

Finally, finally, Keith Griffiths’ documentary about Len Lye (1901–1980) turns up on YouTube. Doodlin’ – Impressions of Len Lye was made in 1987, and is one of several films that Griffiths made about avant-garde film-makers. There’s some slight crossover with his later history of abstract cinema—Stan Brakhage turns up in both films—but Lye was always much more than a film-maker despite his pioneering work of the 1930s. Doodlin’ charts Lye’s progress from his youth in New Zealand, where his…

Continuing an occasional series about artworks in feature films. This is a minor entry but a worthwhile one if only to draw some attention to an unusual fantasy film by Albert Lewin, an equally unusual director. Pandora and the Flying Dutchman was made in 1951, a British film with an American star (Ava Gardner) and a Spanish setting. Gardner plays Pandora Reynolds, an American nightclub singer living in the coastal town of Esperanza where she’s the centre of attention for the small colony of…

Dante in his Study with Episodes from the Inferno (1978) by Tom Phillips. • “This set, featuring two of the surviving members of Cabaret Voltaire, is as clear and powerful as any of the live albums the group released while Richard H. Kirk was alive.” Derek Walmsley, reviewing what we’ve been told will be the last ever Cabaret Voltaire album. I can also vouch for its excellence but then I’m what you might call an impartial listener. My copy arrived in the post only a couple of hours before…

Disconsolate. More unknown Kay Nielsen, although “little-known” would be more accurate since the sombre nature of these drawings has made them popular among the image-hoarders in the Tumblr labyrinth. Nielsen created the series known as The Book of Death around 1910 when he was an art student studying in Paris, the “Book” being a cycle of ten (or more?) drawings that chart the progress of one of those Pierrots who we find mourning a lost love. The series was exhibited in London but wasn’t…

Dell 5, Four Frightened Women by George Harmon Coxe, was the first of the mapbacks. On the back cover of each of these books is, naturally, a map—a cutaway bird’s-eye view of the apartment building, house, hotel or city-section in which the events of the book take place. These drawings were generally quite faithful to the books; the most careful one was probably the map sketched by author Hake Talbot for his own book, Rim of the Pit (Dell 173), and executed, as were most of the mapbacks, by…