John Austen’s Hamlet Illustrations.

I’m really loving book illustrations at the moment, so I think I’ll keep posting more of them. In particular, I’m fascinated by these sorts of intricate, high-contrast black and white ink drawings, because it’s more or less the opposite of what I do – I can’t seem to draw anything without adding layers and layers of shading, and I admire artists who can create the illusion of depth and dimension without the need for it. So anyway…

John Austen was an English illustrator inspired in his early days by the very stylish pen and ink work of Aubrey Beardsley. Though he soon left this style behind in favour of a more modern art deco approach, his illustrations for a 1922 edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet are quite spectacular. Not surprisingly, Austen was a friend of Irish book illustrator Harry Clarke, whose incredible drawings for Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination I intend to scan and upload here soon.

These images, which I have cropped down from the original scans, came from Chris Mullen’s website The Visual Telling of Stories where he says of the book:

“John Austen 1886 - 1948, was a distinguished and inventive artist.

Nevertheless he illustrated this book where there are too many illustrations, there is an insecure balance with the weight and meaning of the text, and in design terms throughout, hopelessly overblown and inappropriate.

That being said, you will be entertained by them.”

Thanks to two of my favourite bloggers, Thom at The Pictorial Arts and John at Feuilleton for introducing me to this artist.

Arthur Rackham’s Comus

Comus is a 17th Century masque written by John Milton, which I will confess right now to not having read. But according to someone at Escape Into Life:

"The masque is a semi-allegorical portrayal of sin, or temptation, in the character of Comus, and chastity or temperance, in the character of Lady. Despite Comus’s attempts to trick Lady into drinking a magical cup (representing sexual pleasure), Lady refuses to give in to the sinful Comus. Comus challenges Lady in various other ways, such as arguing that desire is natural to a human being, but Lady will not be seduced. The rest of the masque involves the Attendant Spirit, an angelic figure, who comes to rescue her."

If you really want to read the text, you can do so here, or you can read more about it on Wikipedia. But if you’re anything like me, you’ll get the general gist of the story and then lose yourself in these amazing illustrations by Arthur Rackham.  To see the entire collection, visit archive.org, and if you really like them you can buy prints here. 

One of the things I like about Rackham’s work is that his goblins and ogres are strangely reminiscent to me of the numerous satyrs scrawled by my favourite artist and all-time hero Austin Osman Spare, whose work I will post about on here one day when I can be bothered scanning all my books. I say strangely because from what I’ve read the two men could not have been more different in their characters and ideologies. There will be more of Rackham’s work to come on here too.

Incidentally, there is also a superb psychedelic folk band from the 70’s named Comus, who have recently reformed and played a few live shows at festivals like Roadburn. They sound a bit like the deranged love-child of Amon Duul II and The Residents, as you’ll find if you play the clip below.

Jean Marembert

I've been collecting pictures of 19th century/early 20th century book illustrations for a while now, particularly black and white ink drawings, and I find them to be infinitely more exciting than most modern art that I come across. Whether this is due to some kind of failure on my part to connect with the collective consciousness of today's youth (entirely possible) or whether it's because they're legitimately of a higher standard is a subjective matter, but either way I can't get enough of them. These images by French artist Jean Marembert come from a book (which I haven't read) called Le Lycanthrope by Petrus Borel, courtesy of the excellent blog Au carrefour etrange.  I didn't have any luck finding out what the book is about, but the art features a lot of cats, which is always a sure-fire way to get me interested in something.

Shamaness

So I finally finished this epic coloured pencil drawing that I started while I was on holidays over Christmas... at least I think it's finished. Why I decided to create an A1 size drawing with tools that can only cover about a milimetre of paper at a time is beyond me, but once I started it I just had to keep going until my fingers felt like those of an arthritic grandma and I was practically cross eyed.

Anyway, lesson learned...hopefully it was worth the bother. I am still tyring to come to terms with the fact that Shaun has described this piece variably as 'fantasy art' and something that looks like it should have been done on black velvet (he swears it was a compliment). The reality is that I was reading a lot about shamanism, and my fascination with that somehow became entangled with my love of tribal bellydance and gypsies and primitive cultures and voodoo...so I guess the result is a confused but honest salute to all of those things. In a way, this pretty much sums up how I feel about being a privileged white person living in an ethnically diverse country where our concept of culture is based entirely on embracing the bits we like of other people's.

In response to these feelings I've been reading more about the history and folklore of Germanic people, including fairy tales, traditional witchcraft and celtic shamanism amongst other things. It's a nice realisation that we do in fact have our own culture and it hasn't entirely disappeared - we just choose to ignore it in favour of things we find more exotic. Clearly I've been as guilty of this as anyone, but in light of recent discoveries some of my art might start taking a new direction now.

Eggs eggs, I love eggs!

I'm channelling Edith Massey for this blog post today, but in this case I'm not talking about the eating of eggs...I'm talking about paintings of them. These beautiful images came from a  blog called The Graphics Fairy; from the name it sounds like something I wouldn't visit in a million years, but the lady who runs it works at an antiques store and collects vintage graphics (long past their copyright) which she scans and uploads for people to use as they please. As luck would have it, she seems to find quite a lot of natural history illustrations which are my newest obsession. These images of eggs are presumably from old books on ornithology, which will be the subject of my next post. I think they're exquisite.

Louis Wain

English illustrator Louis Wain was my kinda guy. The man liked to draw cats...I mean he really liked to draw cats. Shitloads, and shitloads, and shitloads of cats.

 A diagnosed Schizophrenic, who most likely was actually suffering from the more benign Asberger Syndrome, his story is rather a charming one. Already working as a freelance illustrator, Wain's obsession with depicting cats reportedly developed at the age of 23 when his wife developed breast cancer. To entertain and amuse his beloved on her deathbed, he would draw amusing cariacatures of their cat Peter, and teach him to perform tricks. This was followed by commissions for children's books, and later newspaper illustrations in which he depicted cats in anthropomorphic situations. These proved immensely popular, and he enjoyed fame and success for the next two decades with his drawings of cats appearing in books, papers, journals, postcards and ads.

Unfortunately like most artists Wain was not a great businessman, and after making several poor investments he ended up bankrupt. With no money and the popularity of his art dwindling, he finally succumbed to his deteriorating mental health and was admitted to an asylum at the age of 64.  Luckily for him, a visitor to the hospital spotted him drawing one day and recognised the distinctive cats as those of the legendary artist. Appalled that he would live out his final years in a public asylum, she alerted the public and started a campaign to have him relocated to a private, more pleasant facility so he could live out the rest of his days in comfort. Thanks to his loyal fans, this was able to happen and he continued to make cat art until his very last days.

 

"He made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not  look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves."  H.G. Wells.