Category: Look Here

Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Illustration Art · Look Here · Lou Feck

Look Here: Four paperback covers with art by Lou Feck

RC2 Comments

[CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]

Only one of the above paperbacks (scanned straight outta the collection of yours truly) includes a cover credit, but the art on the front of it and two others is signed “Lou Feck,” so… mystery solved! Unfortunately, the art on the fourth, Where Murder Waits, is only signed with the initials “L.F.,” but since the letter forms look the same as in the full signature, the time period is right, and the style is right in artist’s wheelhouse, I strongly suspect that that one is by Lou Feck as well.

The cover of Ice! is a fold out, obviously. Pity that the image, when folded in, doesn’t quite cover the underlying pages. Bet the designer wasn’t too happy when those books were delivered from the printer.

And finally, although Feck’s interpretation of A Canticle for Leibowitz is heavily indebted to the work of Paul Lehr, that cover is iconic — a classic!

Keywords: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Blue Fire, Ice, Where Murder Waits.

Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Frank Frazetta · Illustration Art · Look Here

Look Here: Four slavery obsessed historical novels, two with cover art by Frazetta

RC2 Comments

[CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]

I know that I have posted a scan of Rogue Roman before, but what you see above is a new scan of a different copy of the novel (I have two). I only recently obtained a copy of Child of the Sun (for cheap at — where else? — Value Village), with cover art by Frazetta, so that scan is new, too, as are the others. Seeing those two covers together, Rogue Roman and Child of the Sun, one can appreciate, I think, the significant change — some would say, improvement — in Frazetta’s oil technique from the 1960s to the celebrated paintings of the 1970s.

I have no idea who painted the uncredited covers of The Street of the Sun or Mistress of Falconhurst, although the latter includes the initials (?) RES in the lower left-hand corner. If you know who RES is, feel free to post the artist’s name in the comments section below. [Apparently, RES is Robert E. Schulz; see comment section below.]

As for The Street of the Sun, let’s just say that although the loose illustrative style is attractive, and distinctly less “old-fashioned” than the other three, it is entirely unexceptional for the time period (the late 1960s) and could have been produced by any number of artists.

Keywords: Rogue Roman by Lance Horner, Child of the Sun by Kyle Onstott and Lance Horner, Street of the Sun and Mistress of Falconhurst by Lance Horner, Frank Frazetta, Robert E. Schulz.

Fine Art · Herbert James Draper · Look Here

Look Here: THE SEA MAIDEN (1894) and four studies by Herbert James Draper

RCLeave a comment

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:

[CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE]

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)

Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Illustration Art · Look Here

Look Here: THIS CITY IS OURS, with cover art by the great unknown

RCLeave a comment

A dramatic illustration (by an uncredited artist) and a bold, complementary title treatment (by an uncredited designer) combine to lift the overall design of the cover of Denis Pitts’ thriller novel from the late 1970s about a terrorist threat to Manhattan to a very high level:

[CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]

The lesson here: even though some genres (or time periods) may appear to be (or may in fact be) more blessed than others, great illustrative book covers can appear in any genre (or period).

Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Illustration Art · Look Here · Original art vs. printed page

Look Here: BLUE CAMELLIA (1966), with cover art by Charles Binger

RCLeave a comment

Here’s another random paperback that I picked up at a local church sale just so I could scan it and post it here at RCN; the artist is Charles Binger, who also painted the blonde on the cover of the Perry Mason novel, The Case of the Rolling Bones (1960), which I scanned and posted back in February:

[CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]

As luck would have it, I was easily able to locate a snapshot of the original art, which sold at La Luz de Jesus Gallery for $2,800 back in 2011:

(N.B. Since I don’t own the above artwork and am not offering it for sale, I have taken the liberty of futzing with the original JPEG to make it a bit brighter and clearer, so at this point, it may or may not accurately represent the painting.)

The file name on the exhibition site — Binger_LG_Sophia-Loren-study.jpg — identifies the subject as Sophia Loren. But please note: although the woman in the painting does sort of look like a young Sophia Loren, I have no way to verify whether it really was intended as a likeness of her or not. I’m certainly not enough of a Loren fan to know if Binger based his “study” on a particular publicity photograph of her, but if you are, feel free to post the info below.

Keywords: Blue Camellia.

Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Don Ivan Punchatz · Illustration Art · Look Here

Look Here: Three paperback covers plus with art by Don Ivan Punchatz

RCLeave a comment

“Don Ivan Punchatz — Don Ivan’s ability to touch men with acrylic and melt them into beasts, or touch beasts with oil and ink, and voila, they are senators or brokers is endlessly stunning. Metaphor, after all, is the universal language and Don Ivan Punchatz could teach at Berlitz.”
— Ray Bradbury

BONUS IMAGES:

The covers displayed above were scanned by me from books in my own collection; the covers displayed below were not:

Keywords: The Day of the Burning, Death Tour, Heavy Metal vol. III, no. 9, Times Without Number, Foundation, Second Foundation, Foundation and Empire, the Foundation Trilogy.

Art Collection · Comics · Here, Read · Look Here

Look Here, Read: “Art” by Gabby Schulz

RCLeave a comment

I thought I had posted this already, but yesterday, as I was clicking through the pages in the “Art Collection” category here at RCN, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t. So here, for your viewing and reading enjoyment, is “Art” by Ken “Gabby Schulz” Dahl:

[CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE]

I purchased the above page of original art from the store at Gabby Schulz’s Playhouse back in November of 2012. The email receipt read, in part, as follows:

Thank you for your matronage/patronage! You’ve just helped a cartoonist stave off indigence for another day, and beautified your own life in the process.

Which, instead of making me feel proud to be a matron/patron of the arts, actually made me feel a bit guilty that I had paid so little for the work… but… hey, check it out! There’s another new full-colour strip — “Profiles in Bureaucracy” — on sale right now! Get ’em while they’re a bargain…

And don’t worry if everything is sold out by the time you visit the Playhouse store, because soon enough there will be another page… and another… and another… until inspiration fails… or Gabby calls a halt to the madness…

BONUS BLATHER:

Here’s the tweet I posted right after I purchased the art:

Unfortunately, I haven’t been in a position to purchase more from Gabby Schulz yet. But I am in the process of buying a Barack Hussain Obama original from Steven Weissman, who has a new store up right here!

Better act quickly if you want a page from Steven, though; by his own admission, he is one of those “temperamental” artists who will not tolerate an unresponsive public:

https://twitter.com/WEI_SS_MAN/status/332518858852278272

Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Frank Frazetta · Illustration Art · Look Here · Movies

Look Here: MRS. POLLIFAX — SPY, with cover art by Frank Frazetta

RCLeave a comment

I bought the following battered paperback for a buck at a church sale on the weekend:

[CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]

The image on the cover is an aggressively cropped section of Frank Frazetta’s unusually expansive poster art for the movie Mrs. Pollifax — Spy (1971), which was based on the novel by Dorothy Gilman.

Here, for ease of comparison, are what the poster and the original art look like, more or less:

Notice how, in the poster image, someone or other — the art director? — not only has intensified the colour and contrast but also has moved the hand with the gun, camouflaged in the canopy of the tree in the original, down and slightly to the left, and trimmed back the foliage a bit, in order to make the “threat from above” ridiculously blatant, and I would argue that both changes work rather nicely; that is, the brighter colours seem to me to be more sympathetic to the comedic intent/content of the image — not to mention, more eye-catching — and the change in the position of the arm, etc., integrates the hidden, would-be assassin in a more satisfying way into the overall comedic situation.

(Oddly enough, on the paperback cover, the hand with the gun appears to be positioned more or less where Frazetta has it in his painting, though its effect in that instance — if one notices it at all — seems to me to be more unsettling than it is humorous.)

Notice also the variations in colour among the three images. I don’t know if Frazetta’s original painting is truly as subdued as it looks in that JPEG. What I do know, however, is that my scan at the top of this post matches my copy of the book quite well.