"This day's experience, set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside." –Alice Munro, "What is Remembered"
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The blonde in Doolin’s Planet Comics cover must be light as a feather… perhaps low gravity has made her so… or Jenny Craig… or artistic license… or something…
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From Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository, here are four studies for The Sea Maiden by British artist Herbert James Draper, along with the dramatic, and oddly erotic, final painting; the eroticism was intentional, of course:
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Draper’s inspiration:
CHASTELARD.
Have you read never in French books the song
Called the Duke’s Song, some boy made ages back,
A song of drag-nets hauled across thwart seas
And plucked up with rent sides, and caught therein
A strange-haired woman with sad singing lips,
Cold in the cheek like any stray of sea,
And sweet to touch? so that men seeing her face,
And how she sighed out little Ahs of pain
And soft cries sobbing sideways from her mouth,
Fell in hot love, and having lain with her
Died soon? one time I could have told it through:
Now I have kissed the sea-witch on her eyes
And my lips ache with it; but I shall sleep
Full soon, and a good space of sleep.— Algernon Charles Swinburne, Chastelard, a tragedy (1866)
How many times has a painting by Francis Bacon appeared on the cover of a book that is not about the life and/or art of Francis Bacon? I’m no expert, but I can only think of one instance — you are welcome to post a comment if you know of more! — and here it is, scanned from my personal library, along with a small, low-quality JPEG of Bacon’s original painting, Man in Blue V:
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Now, although Bacon’s painting itself is simply composed and nearly monochromatic in colour, the contrasty, cropped, colour-reduced version on display on the cover of Darkness at Noon reads to me as little more than a shadow of The Man.
Francis Bacon was born 28 October 1909 and died on this day, 28 April, back in 1992. In other words, today is the twenty-first anniversary of the death of Francis Bacon.
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A reader delurked today to bring to my attention another book cover with art by Bacon: Hadrianus VII by Fr. Rolfe (Baron Corvo), with the Fr. being short for “Frederick”. Here’s what it looks like:
The tiny image posted above — the only one I could find on short notice — is from the catalogue of an online bookseller.
Thanks, Arthur!
More covers, freshly scanned, by me, from books in my personal collection:
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Look Here: Four Agatha Christie novels with cover art by Tom Adams
Look Here: Four more Agatha Christie novels with cover art by Tom Adams
Happy Halloween 2012 from RCN! — Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie, with art by Tom Adams
Look Here: Two Raymond Chandlers with cover art by Tom Adams
In the past few days, I’ve read a number of news stories that claim that people in China and elsewhere have been stocking up on candles, matches, canned goods, etc., etc., in anticipation of the “Mayan Apocalypse,” which was/is supposed to happen today. But surely any apocalypse that can be survived via such paltry, pathetic measures is unworthy of the name. You want to see what an apocalypse that’s worthy of the name looks like. Here’s an APOCALYPSE:
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Light every candle you have before the apocalypse arrives, folks. And pray it never comes.
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Google+ albums > Hamid Savkuev. Painting.
Academy of Russian Arts > Hamid Savkuev – includes CV and information about title, size, medium, date, etc., for each piece on display. Also includes more images of Savkuev’s sculpture than you’ll find on most sites. Excellent.
Book Graphics > Agniya. Legend of the Scythians. – illustrations by Hamid Savkuev
Russian Art Tour > Hamid Savkuev (scroll to bottom of page) — 160-page coffee-table book, in Russian, for sale from a site run by American artist, Cathy Locke. Only a few copies are left.
Museum Drawing > Hamid Savkuev (b. 1964).
UniqArt.ru Blog > Hamid Savkuev Exhibition
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I saw the painting Crescent Moon (a.k.a., Moon Nymph) by nineteenth-century Spanish painter and astronomy enthusiast Luis Ricardo Falero for the first time about an hour ago, when I read an article about Falero’s work that Ron Miller wrote for io9 and posted earlier today. And as is my wont, I immediately noticed a possible connection between one of Falero’s paintings and an SF illustration by one of my favourite artists, Jeffrey Jones, the promotion of whose work has been a frequent theme of my posts here at RCN (although not so much lately as it has been in the past):
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At first, I just planned to post a couple of covers by Robert Foster, scanned by me from my personal collection of SF paperbacks, but I have since decided that it might be more interesting to trace one warm line up through the chain of influence that led to Foster’s arresting illustrations for the front and back covers of Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man. So here goes:
The typography on the cover of Behold the Man perfectly complements Foster’s painting, don’t you think? The whole package, front and back, is a real stunner!
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Since I already scanned Foster’s collage-like Alternities cover, I suppose I might as well post that image, too:
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Earlier today, Michael Dooley of Print Magazine’s Imprint blog posted his interview with artist and designer Graham Moore, entitled A Designer’s Midcentury-Mod Music-Graphics Mashups. It is Moore’s collage art that is the focus of the piece. If I could own one of the collages displayed along with the interview or on Moore’s website, it would be GrahamMoore_04.jpg/mo-dernes.jpg (see below), which I imagine to be an enigmatic glimpse of the 1960s through the lens of a parched but ultra-stylish future:
I would love to see more collages by Moore along the same lines, but, alas, “Mo Dernes” seems to be a one-off… although here’s a piece from Moore’s sketchbook that explains the silhouettes of the women:
See also here and here on Moore’s site for more sketchbook variations on the silhouette theme.
Magritte did a lot with silhouettes. I’ll post some examples when I have a moment…
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Update (10 October 2012):
Just thought I would mention here that I contacted Graham Moore after I posted the above images and information and asked him if the mo-dernes collage was for sale — it was! — and even though his asking price was a little beyond what my meagre acquisitions budget can ordinarily sustain for a single work of art, Graham kindly made it possible for me to own the piece by allowing me to pay for it in affordable instalments spread out over about three months.
And as I told Graham by email when I finally had the artwork in hand, I’m very pleased with my purchase. Mo-dernes is a page cut from Graham’s sketchbook, and as such, I expected it to be smaller than it is. In fact, the piece is fairly large for an old-fashioned, hand-cut, magazine-image collage. And needless to say, aesthetically speaking, it really hits a sweet spot for me in terms of composition, colour, and content. I won’t torture you with a formal analysis of what you can see for yourself; however, I must say, this time around, with the actual artwork in front of me, I’m especially taken with the way that the physical texture of the orange paint that Graham has mopped and dragged across the grain of the paper echoes the virtual black-and-white texture visible most clearly in the skin of the models inside the silhouettes. Lovely!
Ragged Claws Network 
