Lilacs and Champagne

This new project by Emil Amos and Alex Hall - roughly one half of Grails who are definitely my favourite band of recent years - is ruling both my turntable and my iPod at the moment. I've always loved sample-based music, and in fact one of my first musical obsessions as a young teenager was Pop Will Eat Itself, a band with a philosophy of recycling music (hence the name) that consisted of live instruments and vocals coupled with layer upon layer of samples, some impossibly obscure and others as blatant as the vocals from Mel & Kim's Respectable which they used in Hit the Hi-Tech Groove (their song from 1987 that describes the aforementioned philosophy)....but I digress. Lilacs and Champagne bear no resemblance to PWEI and have more of a spooky instrumental hip-hop vibe, which is better described and reviewed here. Below is one of the neat videos Emil made to promote the new L&C record:


LILACS! from The Fact Facer on Vimeo.

I think what I love about sampled music is the juxtaposition of soundbites both new and familiar, arranged in unexpected and harmonious ways to create mood and texture and narrative unobtainable by conventional instrumentation or vocalisation. Perhaps it's partly to do with referencing or capturing someone else's sentiment and re-framing it to say something different, or to emphasise something that would be difficult or awkward to express more candidly...either way, it's fun and I hope L&C have more like this to come. If you're into it, order the CD or LP from Mexican Summer here, check out the L&C Facebook page here, and check out more of Emil's effed-up videos on Vimeo here.

Dylan Carlson solo project.

Dylan Carlson makes some of the most melancholic and profoundly beautiful music I have ever heard. I don't know exactly how to describe it, other than that it's slow and patient and meditative, and at times incredibly sad. To me, this music is the sound of a man's intimate relationship with his own being; a life-time of painful reflection, and an exploration of the way chords and melodies and lingering moments of empty space can become extensions of ones self in order to communicate those abstract sentiments that words can't possibly express.

Appropriately, Dylan's band, for which he is the founding member and principle songwriter, is called Earth. The only comparison that I can think of is Popol Vuh, because their spacious and repetitive music, used to great effect in Werner Herzog's slow-paced movies, invokes the same kind of meditative visions that Earth do for me. I remember discussing both bands with Shaun once, and saying that I felt it was impossible to have mundane or vapid thoughts whilst listening to their music - it almost demands that you slow down and reflect, and contemplate matters of  importance instead.

But enough about Earth; the reason for this blog post is to bring some attention to the fact that Dylan Carlson is currently trying to reach his funding goals for a solo project called Wonders from the House of Albion, and he only has one week left. The album sounds like it will be an ambitious and deeply personal work, involving a visit to his ancestral homeland in the UK to make recordings at megalithic sites, and investigate his experiences with suspected ffayre-ffolke or familiar spirits. As Shaun and I shall be making our own gnostic odyssey (to put it in Julian Cope's words) to the UK in about 5 weeks time, the concept behind this album is particularly exciting to us.  If you would like to help with his project, no matter how small the amount, please visit his Kickstarter page and donate what you can. In the meantime, enjoy some Earth.

Victoria Amazonica

I stumbled on these incredible botanical illustrations of Amazon Lilies recently and can’t stop looking at them. It’s difficult to tell from the pictures, but the pads of these lilies are enormous and covered in extremely sharp spines – nothing like the quaint lily pads you see floating on ponds in most gardens. I have witnessed these amazing things first-hand at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, where they have their own enclosed pond that I recommend you visit if you get the chance.

The first image is a beautiful example of my favourite type of botanical drawing, with the cross sections and individual parts shown in separate diagrams – they’re so much more appealing to me than a simple image of the specimen as a whole. I think maybe I respond to them so much because they occupy a particular space in the scientific world that photography never can, and because they reflect mankind’s profound desire to not only appreciate these beautiful things, but to explore and understand them. I can’t wait to do a more thorough rendition of an Amanita muscaria mushroom in this style, which hopefully might happen next mushroom season.

The first four of these images came from the NYPL Digital Library, and I found the last two in the exhaustive collection of images from Curtis’s Botanical Magazine on Wikimedia Commons. Enjoy.

  

More AJ Fosik

About two years ago I posted a short blog about a wonderful man named AJ Fosik, who makes some of the most awe-inspiring sculptures I've ever seen:

There aren't too many artists around these days whose work is truly unique and memorable to me, but I really think AJ has created something pretty special with these creatures. So imagine my delight when I discovered that he would be creating the cover art for the new album by Mastodon, my favourite metal band, and that they've made a cool video to promote their new single featuring the sculptor at work:



More of AJ's goodness:

I'm not sure exactly what Fosik is getting at with these sculptures, but I don't think it matters because one thing is for sure: they are at the opposite end of the art spectrum to all the annoying, ironic, post-modern wankery that the chin-scratching gallery crowd are so very fond of. It's refreshing to see art that appeals to the viewer in such an honest, uncomplicated fashion - you don't need to read his manifesto or ask him about his childhood traumas to appreciate what he's doing. In the little artist profile posted below, he talks about a fondness for folk-art which is a nice point of reference, and one that I can relate to working as a tattooist.



Here's hoping I can have an AJ Fosik original hanging on my wall one day.

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.

Riding the ascending comet of bad postmodern art.

Actually, the full title of this photo by art-world-hating photographer Les Krims is 'Two Feminist Artists Riding the Ascending Comet of Bad Postmodern Art, Buffalo New York 1976'.  Lord only knows how jaded he must be by now.

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.

Botanical Illustration

I took my first ever class in botanical illustration today, at Melbourne's beautiful botanical gardens. I've been somewhat preoccupied with both natural history art and with plants for a while now, and this seems like the logical way to explore these interests. So far we've only done some sketches of gum nuts, but already I get the impression this is going to be a life-time passion, and something that feels natural and intuitive for me as an artist. There's something about the meditative process of observing nature so closely, and the discipline of replicating it as faithfully as possible, that I find really appealing - perhaps because the focus is on the inherent beauty and perfection of the subject, rather than on the artist.

For me, obsessing over how impossibly beautiful something is, whether it's a flower, a melody, a sentiment or another human being, is precisely what inspires me to make art in the first place. The art may not always resemble what I'm obsessing over, but profoundly emotive responses to things are always what inform my visions and stimulate my desire to put them on paper. It's only when my whole being is consumed with that kind of euphoria that I can make art that really feels alive and meaningful. I think this is why music provides me with the most inspiration of all - because as a visual artist it communicates to me in a way that feels entirely mystical and beyond my comprehension.

  

There's nothing nicer than recognising in another person the same creative impulses that I feel, but expressed in a completely different way, and I think that's why I have a tendency to become enamoured with artists who work in formats other than my own. People I find hugely inspiring like David Lynch, Werner Herzog, Justin Broadrick and Emil Amos are all operating from a sincere and deeply felt desire to express themselves, and they do so tirelessly and without compromise. Often it's their approach and dedication to their art that touches me more than the art itself, but the one commonality between them all is their ability to make me feel as though the world is essentially a beautiful place. Looking at some of the botanical art pictured, it's an easy thing to believe.

I scanned these images from a Taschen book called Garden Of Eden which was my birthday present from Shaun this year. Thanks babe.

Chris Conn Askew

 Chris Conn has long been one of my favourite artists. A celebrated tattooist for 15 or so years, he has now retired from tattooing to focus on his personal art, and I for one am glad he did. Chris clearly possesses a strong and unique vision, apparently drawing inspiration from numerous and far-reaching sources, and it seems that as a tattooist he felt this vision was being compromised, as it always will be when working for a client. I personally feel that as a tattooist your job is to create a piece of art that first and foremost serves the interests of your client, and secondly serves your own; so if you don't want to make art that bends to someone else's will, quitting your job in order to paint seems an honourable thing to do.  And in Chris's case, this decision has resulted in some truly exquisite paintings.

Littering his work with references to music, literature,  history, folklore and cinema, and channelling the authoritative visual command of propaganda posters from Germany and Soviet Russia, Chris creates art enriched with a personal mythology that expresses something greater than the sum of its parts.  The first time I visited his Myspace page I remember being thoroughly charmed by his unbridled enthusiasm for the various sources of his inspiration, which included photos of his cats, covers of albums he loves, a picture of puss in boots by Gustave Dore and film stills of Theda Bara. Unfortunately many of these pictures have been taken down now but the images of his own art remain, as do the details of how to order prints, so do go there and have a look.  My wonderful boss Jane gave me my first Chris Conn print for my birthday last week, pictured above, and I love it so much that I now find myself wondering why the hell I've never bought any of them before. Anyway, here are some more of my favourites.