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German Expressionist Flyer

Posted on April 5, 2013 by John Guy Collick

Ruth’s flying machine from Thumb

I’ve been working on some art/visualisation pieces for Thumb. As I mentioned before I wanted to capture the feel of the German Expressionist artists and films of the 1920s and 1930s. The movement grew out of a desire to overturn the established order of nineteenth century Europe, whose triumphalist and Imperial certainties had been completely destroyed by the horrors of World War One. Expressionism was characterised by bold colours and lines, and distortion based on the emotions of the writer, painter or film maker. It was Impressionism in reverse. Instead of recreating the impression of the world on the eye, Expressionism expressed inner feelings, often focussing on madness and dreams.

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari film poster

A still from the film, note the distorted set.

German Expressionist Cinema was a sub-genre of the movement, and produced some of the most striking movies ever made. The most famous, and most typical of the style, is The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), the tale of a murderous somnambulist set in a crazily distorted world. Other classics include Murnau’s Faust (1926) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Here are some sample film posters of the period:

Poster from Paul Wegener’s 1915 film Der Golem.

Murnau’s Head of Janus, 1920

And finally, a magnificent poster of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

If I wanted to sum up Thumb in four words it would “Indiana Jones does Kafka”. While there are Steampunk elements in the novel, I’m more interested in capturing the fin-de-siecle absurdities of the early twentieth century, and the atmosphere of Kafka and the German Expressionists. The artwork and trailer I’m doing for Thumb is therefore based on these styles, although I’ve toned down the frantic distortions a bit (mainly because I’m nowhere near as good an artist as those painters and designers of the original movement). Interestingly enough, someone said that the picture of the house in the Wasteland reminds them of Tim Burton’s style, which is great because Burton is also heavily influenced by films like Caligari

The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke – Richard Dadd

Posted on April 2, 2013 by John Guy Collick

Detail from Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards British painting bore little resemblance to its European counterpart. While the French Impressionists forged ahead with their bold experiments in light and composition, English painters headed off into the realms of Genre and Narrative art. For them and their audiences the content of a picture became more important than how it was executed. A good painting was defined as one that told a story, preferably with an improving moral. Naturally this favoured realism above all else, with art often imitating the theatre by showing box-shaped scenes filled with portentous drama. The first work in Augustus Egg’s trilogy Past and Present is a perfect example. The execution is pretty dire but that’s not the point, the painting is intended to demonstrate the evils of Fallen Women so not only do we see Mother prostrated by the Discovery of her Infidelity, but the rest of the canvas is filled with Symbols to drive home the point (half-eaten apple on the carpet – original sin, geddit? Falling house of cards etc…).

Augustus Egg, Past and Present 1. Mother’s Sordid Goings-On Revealed!

Narrative art wasn’t all about petit bourgeois moralising. History paintings were popular, especially accurate depictions of Great Scenes from English History. Shakespeare also became a rich source of ideas, largely because of the demand for illustrated editions of his works so people could look at the pictures rather than struggle through the verse.

Come Unto These Yellow Sands. Richard Dadd's fairly normal illustration from The Tempest.

Come Unto These Yellow Sands. Richard Dadd’s relatively normal illustration from The Tempest.

Fairy paintings made up one small and rather odd sub-genre of Victorian Narrative art. A lot of the time this was part of the overspill from Shakespeare pictures, with artists portraying scenes and characters from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. The birth of a market in children’s books also awakened an interest in folklore and legends from England’s past, a fascination that culminated in the Cottingley Fairies incident in 1917 when two little girls photographed themselves with cut-out fairy figures and claimed they were real. To anyone with half a brain the pictures are obviously fake, and yet minds as fine as Arthur Conan Doyle’s proclaimed them genuine.

The Cottingley Fairies. Arthur Conan Doyle thought these were real, the muppet!

Of all the fairy painters of the mid to late nineteenth century by far the oddest was Richard Dadd, whose most famous work The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke (1855-65), is a incredibly detailed tableaux showing a tiny workman cracking a hazelnut with a hammer while a crowd of odd creatures look on. Richard Dadd was insane, possibly a paranoid schizophrenic, and was imprisoned in Bethlem, and later Broadmoor, psychiatric prisons after he murdered his father in 1843. He was encouraged to continue painting as part of his treatment and produced a number of canvases, of which The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke is his most famous and fascinating.

The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke by Richard Dadd.

The picture is filled with almost microscopic, painstaking detail. The observation of the flowers and insects is meticulous. The characters watching the Fairy Feller are a curious mixture of pantomime Kings, Queens and pirates, mixed up with people who could have stepped off a mid-Victorian street. Many of the characters have distorted heads, a symptom of schizophrenia whereby the part of the brain that processes faces is affected by the disease.

Detail from The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke. Spot the tiny figures behind the two women.

Perspective is almost non-existent, and wherever you look more details (and tinier figures) pop out at you. It’s a painting that is as fascinating and beautiful as it is disturbing, and is certainly a million miles away from the more conventional pixies and elves of Arthur Rackham and other fantasy illustrators of the late 19th and early 20th century. It’s the kind of picture my Grandfather would spend hours poring over with a magnifying glass because he was a bit strange that way.

The best online reproduction is on the website of the Tate Gallery here.

I’ve uploaded a large resolution version of the entire picture here so you can revel in the detail.

Photograph of Richard Dadd

Cartoonophobia by Jim Barker

Posted on March 2, 2013 by John Guy Collick

I wanted to give this blog post over to a friend of mine who is a brilliant independent cartoonist; Jim Barker of Jim Barker Cartoons and Graphics. Having lived in Japan for ten years, I can entirely sympathise with this. For the Japanese, manga are a narrative art form to be taken as seriously as any other form of art. They are used not only for entertainment, but to educate as well. Similarly in France, Bande dessinée have reached astonishing levels of sophistication. Unfortunately in the UK, cultural snobbery has meant that the real potential of cartoons and comics as an art form and a medium for expression has yet to be fully realised. For those readers not familiar with the difference between UK comic traditions and those elsewhere I’ve added three examples from France, the UK and Japan so you can see the difference.

Over to Jim…

Cartoonophobia by Jim Barker

I blame The Beano.

In other parts of the world – Europe, America, Japan – cartoons and comic strips are regarded as a legitimate and serious art form. In the UK, however, thanks to generations of cheaply produced comics, they are still seen as simply ‘kids stuff’. It’s amazing how sniffy people can be about cartoons. I’ll meet a marketing’n’PR person at a networking event and the minute I say I draw cartoons, you can see the eyes glaze over, barriers going up and they’re looking over my shoulder searching for the next meeja person to talk to.

Japan – Tezuka Osama’s wonderfully sophisticated Life of Buddha.

Happily there ARE people who realize how useful cartoons and humour can be as communications tools. No one can deny that in presentations, pictures are much more efficient at telling a story than wodges and wodges of words. Equally, using humor, the points are easier to make, the message is better understood, and the audience will pay closer attention to details or points you want to get across.

The average person will remember about 70% of a verbal presentation three hours later and as little as 10% three days later. With a visual presentation 85% is remembered three hours later and up to 20% after three days.

But primarily the purpose of a cartoon to make people smile. And that’s something we all need these days. It is a fact that laughter releases endorphins that make people feel relaxed and overall happy. Visuals… humour… visual humour… not rocket science, is it?

Cartoon characters have been used for years to personify companies. Tony the Tiger, for example. Or the Tetley Tea Folk. The BBC used a cartoon animation to publicise their Olympic coverage. And there’s hardly a football team in the UK that doesn’t have their own cartoon mascot.

Cartoons are very effective in Health and Safety matters where they can easily depict subject matter impossible to do using other methods. I once had to draw a poster about diarrhoea and swimming pools which would have been very unpleasant using photographs. Or the brochure which featured several STDs as animated characters. Or the poster which showed the consequences of putting a hand too near a band saw…

France – Enki Bilal’s Immortals.

They are also very useful in training – showing the consequences of following/not following a procedure. Or dealing with sales and Customer relations. Or simply as a way of motivating a sales team.

UK – The Beano. Spot the difference?

Having been in the graphics and illustration business for … well, more years than I care to think about… I firmly believe that cartoons – whether it’s a single illustration to brighten up a newsletter, a presentation caricature as gift for a client or member of staff… or a full scale corporate strategy involving mascots, merchandising and promotional material – are a major weapon in anyone’s marketing, promotions and communications arsenal.

All I have to do now is convince everyone else.

Jim Barker – Jim Barker Cartoons and Graphics

Jim Barker

Life Before Man

Posted on February 21, 2013 by John Guy Collick

On my last trip up to Yorkshire I found one of my favourite childhood books, Life Before Man, by Zdenek Burian (pictures) and Zdenek V. Spinar (text), published in 1972 by Thames and Hudson. I bought this when it first came out and it entranced me for years.

Nowadays photorealistic dinosaurs are de rigueur, thanks to Jurassic Park (1993) and TV series like Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) but in the 60s and 70s making prehistoric beasts come to life was a real challenge. Films went for two approaches to the problem – either using stop motion rubber models (Valley of the Gwangi (1969) and A Million Years BC (1966)) or gluing fins onto real lizards, poking them with a stick and filming them in slow motion (The Lost World (1960) and Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1959)). They also tended to mess things up historically by introducing women who ran about screaming and spraining their ankles mid-flight, as was required by the artistic sensibilities of the time. Only the Stravinsky sequence in Fantasia (1940) came anywhere near a decent attempt at scientific accuracy.

A gala dinner held inside a wildly inaccurate dinosaur in 1853

Artists had been trying to recreate the beasts since Victorians fell in love with the monsters in the middle of the 19th century, though first attempts came up with some spectacular errors. Most famous of these was the sculpture of the Iguanadon intended for Crystal Palace gardens. The artist knew the monster had a spiky bit but was at a loss where to put it, so he stuck it on the end of the creature’s nose (it belongs on its thumb). He also made it four-legged, not bipedal, though this did help when a gala dinner was held inside the mould in 1853.

The obligatory Tyrannosaurus Rex

Zdenek Burian’s paintings were revolutionary because of their obsessive attention to detail, and the almost near-photographic execution. Many of them are also ‘action shots’ rather than the rather dull static images of the day. Scientific discoveries have rendered some of the images inaccurate, his biped dinosaurs appear to walk like humans dragging big tails, rather than like birds with their rear ends stuck out for balance. Yet both his dinosaurs and their surroundings appeared completely believable, so much so that one foil-hatted UFO-hoaxer used Burian’s picture of Pteranadon as a ‘photograph’ proving he’d journeyed back in time with the help of his alien chums.

Burian’s painting of a Pteranodon used as photographic ‘proof’ of Billy Meier’s time travel.

Life Before Man is also remarkable for the sheer number and scope of the pictures. The book is chronological and spans prehistory from the cratered volcanic wilderness of 4600 million years ago, through the Precambrian all the way through to the Quaternary era and the New Stone Age. Not only does it show prehistoric monsters in all their glory but also the rise of the mammals, and eventually the different stages of man’s evolution.

Neanderthal man makes something to poke Homo Sapiens with.

After the dinosaurs the mammals are a bit dull; big cats, hairy elephants and odd looking rinoceri, but Burian comes into his own again with wonderfully evocative images of early people engaged in various prehistoric pursuits such as Chipping Flints or Pointing at Things and Grunting in Alarm. Here the quality of the images is patchy, but when he’s at his best you could believe you are looking at portraits of living beings. Here’s his rendition of Homo Erectus from half a million years ago.

Homo Erectus (Peking Man)

Sadly Life Before Man is currently out of print but stray copies occasionally appear on Amazon.

Here’s a link to Billy Meier’s website in which he answers accusations that the photo of a Pteranodon he took while time travelling was simply a copy of Burian’s painting. He backs up his argument with a letter from Ptaah the Plejaran of the Andromeda Council who blames it on Quetzal, another alien, for going off on one and stealing all the original negatives.

John Martin – Catastrophic Artist

Posted on January 22, 2013 by John Guy Collick

A belated Happy New Year to everyone. This post is a bit later than I anticipated because I’ve spent the weeks after Xmas finishing the second draft of Thumb. It’s now been put into a drawer for a month to ferment before I give it another going over and then send it to my editor. In the meantime I thought I’d kick off 2013 with a look at one of my favourite artists, John Martin (1789 – 1854). Martin was a hugely influential painter who specialised in spectacular renditions of cataclysmic biblical scenes. Here’s one of his most famous, The Great Day of His Wrath (1853) which shows the end of the world.

the-great-day-of-his-wrath

Martin’s religious works were revolutionary. Before him paintings from the Bible tended to be of people (i.e. Jesus, the Apostles, Abraham etc.) and covered a very specific range of limited subjects (The Annunciation, The Deposition, Doubting Thomas and so on). People in Martin’s paintings tend to be very small, down in a corner somewhere and usually falling into crevasses while the landscape is hurled about around them. His work follows the Romantic creed of the Sublime, a vision of the natural world that is so vast and powerful that it humbles and awes those who look upon it. At the same time he was influenced by the early Geological schools of the Vulcanists and the Neptunists.

The Destruction Of Sodom And Gomorrah – 1852

The Vulcanists and Neptunists, known collectively as ‘Catastrophic Geologists’ tried to explain how the surface of the Earth had reached its current form. Following the dictates of Platonism, which sees God’s creation as perfect, the world should be a uniform sphere. In reality it has random bits sticking out all over the place. The Vulcanists claimed that the surface of the Earth had been formed by sudden bursts of violent volcanic activity. The Neptunists stated that mighty floods had carved out the mountains and the valleys. The latter had scripture on their side, but in both cases these geologists were postulating a planet that was no more than 6000 years old. Rivalry between the two groups was intense. Neptunists used to waylay Vulcanists and beat them up, Vulcanists would mob Neptunist lectures and throw rotten fruit and horse manure.

The Deluge – 1834

Martin’s paintings belong to this vision of a world subject to massive violent turmoil, with mountains being hurled about and mighty waves thundering over the landscape while cities and people disappear into immense chasms. Interestingly, Immanuel Velikovsky‘s equally bonkers theories of the formation of the solar system (Worlds in Collision, 1950) belong to the same tradition.

Portrait of John Martin by Henry Warren – 1838

The Vulcanists and Neptunists were superseded in the early 1830s by an altogether more sensible paradigm when Charles Lyell published Principles of Geology. This argued that the surface of the Earth had been created by forces still in existence, i.e. erosion. Though seemingly a bit prosaic compared to previous ideas, it was incredibly revolutionary, not least because its claims necessitated an Earth that was millions of years old, not thousands. Lyell, and the idea of ‘Deep Geological Time’, paved the way for Darwin, giving him a timescale in which his concept of evolution could properly operate.

None of this deterred Martin from his apocalyptic visions (or having a crack at some rather cuddly dinosaurs as in his frontispiece to Gideon Mantell‘s The Wonders of Geology (1838)). He carried on painting huge, dramatic canvases that have influenced artists and film makers ever since. My Great Uncle Archie used to come over all peculiar when standing in front of a painting by John Martin. I can see why, they are often so large that if you stand close enough they fill your field of vision, and you get the same feeling of slight dizziness you get with IMAX.

iguanodon
Finally – rumour used to abound that John Martin set fire to York Minster so he could have something spectacular to paint. In reality it was his elder brother, Jonathan Martin, who tried to burn the edifice down, and who ended up in a lunatic asylum.

Nicholas Roerich – Eldritch Artist

Posted on November 19, 2012 by John Guy Collick

Nicholas Roerich, 1874 – 1947

When I was in Moscow I got the chance to visit the Nicholas Roerich Art Museum. Roerich lived in the early half of the twentieth century and was part of a movement that revolutionised Russian painting. He was keenly interested in spiritualism and tried to found a new religion for the 20th century based on a combination of Western and Eastern faiths.

Russian art from the time of Peter the Great was pretty much in thrall to the salons of Europe. With the young Tsar’s reforms anything traditionally Russian was sneered at as backwards and medieval, compared to the Enlightenment sophistication of the West. The Russian aristocracy spoke French, as can be seen at the start of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Not surprisingly Napoleon’s invasion seriously dented Russia’s love affair with Parisian sophistication and, with the rise of nationalism in 19th century Europe, Russian writers and artists started to turn to their own traditions for inspiration.

Madonna Laboris – 1933

Like the British Pre-Raphaelites, Russian artists started to explore their own medieval and ancient past. The Slavophile “Wanderers” were a Moscow based art collective who not only set about rediscovering ancient arts and crafts (building furniture and the occasional church), but also linked these to social reforms. In St Petersburg painters, writers and musicians gathered around the new Symbolist magazine World of Art. One of these was Nicholas Roerich who, after befriending both Diaghilev and Stravinsky, designed the sets for the dangerously primitivist ballet The Rite of Spring, which famously caused a riot on its first performance in (of all places) Paris in 1913.

Victory (Gorynych the Serpent) – 1942

Roerich was obsessed with ancient myths and legends. In the late 1920s he went on an expedition to Tibet and Asia. By now, steeped in eldritch ideas (under the influence of the wonderfully barmy Madam Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society) he’d created a new pantheistic ethical religion, dressed himself in prophetic robes and published numerous pamphlets on the coming spiritual dawn, when all beliefs would re-unite.

Drops of Life – 1924

Roerich’s paintings are mentioned in H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1931), where they are described as ‘disturbing’. They are, in fact, both beautiful and astonishing, especially the canvases he produced during and after his expedition. They often show lone figures from Slavic, Indian and Asian mythologies standing in dramatic wastelands, illustrating key events from legends. Even though many of his pictures are simple and primitivist his portrayal of light is stunning, especially in his mountainscapes. Like most Symbolist paintings they are evocative, relying on mood for effect, rather than obvious imagery or narrative. They do have a hint of Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith about them, and in overall composition and colour schemes they remind me of Bruce Pennington’s artwork.

And We Do Not Fear – 1922

The Nicholas Roerich Museum in Moscow is well worth a visit and is full of paintings, carvings and records of his expeditions. There is also the Nicholas Roerich Museum in Upper Manhattan. The best monograph in English I can find is Messenger of Beauty: The Life and Visionary Art of Nicholas Roerich by Jacqueline Decter.

Mohammed the Prophet – 1925

Pop Art Spaceman

Posted on October 2, 2012 by John Guy Collick

I grew up in the Swinging Sixties, and as my parents were an architect and an artist our house was full of the latest trendy examples of art and furniture. As I mentioned before, the interior of Kubrick’s space wheel in 2001 was our lounge, without the curving floor. My mother went to Leeds College of Art and in Yorkshire at that time there was a thriving Modern Art movement in the area. David Hockney was just starting out and his early pictures were shown at the Goosewell Gallery near Bradford. In 1977 my parents bought the gallery and we ran it as such until the early 1980s, though by that time Hockney had moved on to bigger things.

Pop Art was the big movement of the 60s. Although it’s associated with major American artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, it actually began in the UK where it continued to flourish in parallel with the US version. The first Pop Art work is generally held to be Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?

Pop Art focused on the concept of the Media Landscape; a world of advertising, popular icons and mass-produced commodities that increasingly defined the world we lived in, and which was rapidly becoming as significant to us as the ‘real’ world. In consumerist 60s more and more people identified themselves by what they bought and wore. Pop Art took images from this world and turned them into bold, colourful art. It’s great to look at, but it also works as a critique of a civilisation obsessed with shallow consumerism and imagery for its own sake. You can find the science fiction equivalent of Pop Art in J. G. Ballard’s middle period novels – Crash, Concrete Island, High Rise and the magnificently weird The Atrocity Exhibition.

Since I was six years old this print hung on the wall of our lounge. It’s now above my desk in my study. It’s called Komtek I and is by the Bradford Pop artist Michael Fossick, who was a friend of my mother’s. It was a limited edition of 15 prints. What is interesting is that the master print is in the Smithsonian Institute, where it incorrectly states that its origin is the US (and that it was transferred from NASA). Fossick was from Bradford in Yorkshire. The blurb on the website describes how in the 1960s NASA and the US National Gallery of Art sent artists to NASA’s facilities to record what they saw, and to capture the great project that would eventually lead to man walking on the moon.

Jackson Pollock – the CIA’s favourite artist

What many don’t know is that art and US politics were closely intertwined during the Cold War, to the extent that the CIA funded modern artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Abstract Expressionism, long derided as meaningless modern art at its worst, was, to the spooks, a perfect example of the American Dream. It was big, bold, romantic and passionate, and the guy who did it dressed like a cowboy. By the time Pop Art came around the CIA had lost interest, the new movements were a bit too cynical and anti-establishment. Nevertheless the Pop Art print Komtek I is a fascinating example of Modern Art meeting NASA at a time when the Gemini and Apollo programs symbolised all that was great in American civilisation. The fact that it was created by a bloke from Bradford in Yorkshire makes it all the more intriguing, and Komtek I has a decided Russian feel to it.

When I was in Moscow I spotted this statue of Yuri Gagarin. It dates from the 1980s and so it’s not quite Soviet Realist, rules had relaxed a bit. I think it’s great and I wish I could get a copy to put on my desk under Komtek I. I also would like to find out who the astronaut is in Komtek I so if anyone recognises him let me know.

The portraits of Otto Dix

Posted on July 7, 2012 by John Guy Collick

Having your friend to paint your portrait is always nice, especially if they’re a famous artist. Unless your best mate was Otto Dix, the Expressionist painter who lived and worked in Germany between the wars. Scarred by his experiences in the trenches of World War I, Dix specialised in brutal and unforgiving pictures of the horrors of battle, the decadence of the Weimar Republic and frankly scary portraits of his friends and acquaintances. Expressionism was a reaction to the Impressionism of the previous century. Impressionist painters like Monet tried to capture the transient beauty of the world around them by focussing on light, movement and the unguarded moment. Expressionists countered this by using art to express internal emotions (usually the negative ones) with distorted imagery, violent brush strokes and primitive colours. Edvard Munch’s famous painting The scream is often credited as one of the first examples of Expressionism. When painting people Expressionists exaggerated the grotesque and the idiosyncratic.

Agreeing to sit for a Dix portrait meant you were likely to end up looking mad, bog-eyed and, more often than not, a bit green. At the top of this post is Dix’s famous 1926 portrait of the journalist Sylvia von Harden who he claimed ‘represented the age’. As you can see it’s pretty unforgiving. von Harden’s pose is an odd mixture of relaxed (elbow on the back of the chair, droopy stockings, half-open eyes) and neurotically tense (clawed left hand and fixed grin/snarl). The dominant reds add to the overall feeling of angst, making it quite an edgy painting given that it shows someone sitting in a cafe having a casual cigarette.

Dr. Hans Koch was a good friend of Otto Dix, and would occasionally sit for him. Dr. Koch was a Dermatologist and Urologist and this painting shows him in his surgery. He loved art and became one of Dix’s main patrons, encouraging him in his work. This was despite the fact that Dix stole Koch’s wife as soon as they met. Apparently Koch said something along the lines of “If you are going to take her away from me, then do it properly,” so Dix married her in 1923. The mind boggles. Dix stole his wife and painted this picture, and Dr. Koch was still friends with him and gave him money to paint more.

Here’s a more normal (by Dix’s standards) portrait. Despite the unnatural poses and eerie expressions you get a very strong sense of affection in The Painter Hans Theo Richter and His Wife Gisela (1933). Gisela herself reminds me a lot of Edward Gorey’s drawings, particularly in her expression and attenuated, slightly distorted, figure.

Otto Dix was a brilliant artist. His paintings are brutal and uncompromising, but his portraits show such wonderful characters. There are novels galore waiting to be written about his inhabitants of an Expressionist inter-war Europe, and the vicious, decadent cities they inhabit.

Not surprisingly the Nazis had a field day with Otto Dix, branding him ‘degenerate’ and kicking him out of his job at Dresden Academy.

Here’s two more portraits, one of The Dancer Anita Berber and the other of The Painter Adolf Uzarski . Anita Berber was famous for (among many other things) dancing nude and drinking a bottle of Cognac a day, though not necessarily at the same time.

Dix survived the war and continued to paint until his death in 1969. Interestingly enough, his most ‘normal’ paintings tended to be of himself. Here’s a rather more flattering portrayal of himself in Self Portrait with an Easel.

Warwick Goble’s original illustrations to The War of the Worlds

Posted on July 2, 2012 by John Guy Collick

H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds was first serialised in Pearson’s Magazine in 1897. By sheer luck, many years ago, I came across the complete bound set of that year’s issues in a little second hand bookshop in Ilkley selling for a few quid. So I’m lucky enough to have a copy of the first edition of the book. It’s a lot shorter than the final novel, Wells expanded it considerably afterwards, and the story is still a bit rough round the edges. What makes the magazine special, though, are the fantastic illustrations by Warwick Goble. These are the first pictures of the Martians and their tripods and, I think, the best. I’ve scanned in a selection of the illustrations so you can see how the invaders looked to the Victorians who bought the magazine to read in their parlours and on the train.

Warwick Goble’s Martians are very simple and functional. I always thought that later versions were too hi-tech and futuristic for the setting of the book. They also showed the Tripod legs as articulated, like a human’s or a spiders. In the novel Wells is at pains to point out that the Martian legs are rigid, which is how Warwick Goble draws them. The images on the left and below show them wading through the Thames and generally causing mayhem round the M25 corridor.

The rest of the pictures follow the sequence of the story, including a rare image of the Martian flying machine, pouring poisonous black smoke onto the land. The Martians are a bit too cute, though they are the first attempt to visualise beings from another world. It’s also nice to see a young lady having a pop at the invaders with her Webley revolver instead of swooning into a heap.

One of the Martian invaders

A Martian flying machine

Fleeing the black smoke

“Take that sir, you slimy, tentacled cad!”

The lone Tripod standing on Primrose Hill

Slain by the common cold

Early Fantasy Art: the Symbolists

Posted on June 1, 2012 by John Guy Collick

Františec Kupka – The Path of Silence (1902)

The Symbolist and Decadent movement in European art has always been overlooked. It stands between the twin monoliths of Impressionism and Cubism, and is overshadowed by both. It’s also tainted by association with late 19th century Narrative Art, where the story of a painting was more important than the style or quality. A lot of it was dire. Most of Félicien Rops’ stuff should have been consigned to the bin. Wickedly transgressive subject matter is no substitute for an inability to draw.

The Symbolists tried to capture the essence of dreams, but, unlike the Surrealists, they weren’t so interested in Freud. For them, a dream image wasn’t a puzzle which, when unlocked, pointed at sexual repression. It was a gateway to a mysterious other realm that existed beyond the tedium of bourgeois life. Their pictures were designed to evoke moods, not to be interpreted. A good example of this is the fact that Arnold Böcklin’s famous painting below originally had no title because the artist wanted his audience to dream over it. We know it as the Isle of the Dead, but this is only because of the art dealer Fritz Gurlitt, who needed something to stick in the catalogue.

Arnold Böcklin – ‘A Picture to Dream Over’ (1880)

This links a lot of Symbolist painters with writers like H. P. Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany. Lovecraft was openly dismissive of Freud’s “puerile symbolism” (Beyond the Wall of Sleep – 1919). For him dreaming took you to another existence, far richer, evocative and interesting than that of a sickly recluse in Providence, Rhode Island. So in that sense the Symbolists are the early fantasy illustrators of the 20th century, influencing, and occasionally influenced by, writers like Dunsany, W. B. Yeats and others. Any collection of Symbolist art yields some fantastic, but largely forgotten, works. They are an infinity away from the soft-core Barbarian in Bondage genre of most modern fantasy paintings. Here’s a few of my favourites.

Frantisek Kupka’s Resistance, or The Black Idol (1903). Very Lovecraftian, this one and definitely one for the nightmares. The figure is based on the Colossi of Memnon, but given a terrifying twist. It’s hard to tell the scale, it looks as big as a mountain to me. This was the inspiration for the castle in Coppola’s film Dracula (1992)

Fernand Khnopff’s I Lock the Door Upon Myself (1891). This is a perfect example of how the Symbolists could take the portrait of a young woman and turn it into something incredibly creepy and mysterious. The pale gaze of the woman (is she blind?), the odd composition (no perspective, blocks of colour all over the place) and the picture in the top right (a painting or a window?) showing a black shrouded figure in a lonely street, all conspire to create a painting that is very disturbing. I’ve met people who simply can’t look at this one. I think it’s great and would put a print in the lounge if it didn’t frighten the cat.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ The Poor Fisherman (1881). OK, it’s a fisherman standing in a boat with his wife and baby on the shore. But take another look. The set up is completely weird. What is he hoping to catch two-foot away from the bank of an empty lake? Why is his family there? Is the child alive or dead? The wife is gathering plants (for a wreath or to eat?). Like a lot of Symbolist paintings the landscape is completely empty apart from a one or two figures doing inexplicable things. It also deliberately shouts ‘This is a symbol of something else’ but then resolutely fails to give you a clue as to what it’s all about.

Jan Toorop’s Fatality (1893). Jan Toorop was an Indonesian painter who lived and worked in the Netherlands. His paintings were strongly influenced by Javanese art. Many of his works show sinister, fantastic scenes haunted by images of death. This is one example, and would make a perfect illustration to either Dunsany or Moorcock.

This little selection barely scratches the surface. There are some great books on Symbolism available. If you can get hold of the Taschen book it has a good selection of largely unknown works.

John Guy Collick

On and on I sped into futurity...