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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…

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…