Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Davis Meltzer · Illustration Art · Kelly Freas · Look Here

Look Here: Five more SF paperbacks with cover art by Davis Melzer

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More cover scans this morning, which I know will come as a big relief to those of you for whom it comes as a big relief:

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The most obvious influence on Melzer’s art in the early 1970s was Kelly Freas. I have more Freas covers to post, so stay tuned for that, if that’s that sort of thing that’s your sort of thing.

Keywords: Margaret St. Clair, The Dancers of Noyo (NY: Ace, 1973), 13600, with cover art by Davis Meltzer; Theodore Sturgeon, The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon (NY: Ace, 1972), 91060, with cover art by Davis Meltzer; Bruce McAllister, Humanity Prime (NY: Ace, 1971), 34900, with cover art by Davis Meltzer; Clifford D. Simak, Time and Again (NY: Ace, nd), 81001, with cover art by Davis Meltzer; Andre Norton, Web of the Witch World (NY: Ace, nd), 87871, with cover art by Davis Meltzer.

Colleen Browning · Fine Art · Look Here · Look There

Look Here: Three magnificent garden paintings by Colleen Browning

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So who is Colleen Browning? Browning was born in England in 1918. She attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1937 to 1939. She had her first solo exhibition at London’s Little Gallery when she was 31 years old. She moved to America in 1949. And she lived in New York City for the next five decades until her death in 2003. The highlights of Browning’s artistic career are outlined on the back flap of the dust jacket of the first, hardcover edition of her excellent art-instruction book, Working Out a Painting: Techniques for Transforming Your Oils (NY: Watson-Guptill, 1988), which, btw, is the print source of my three scans:

Colleen Browning has taught art at Pratt Institute, the City College of New York, and the National Academy of Design. She has been elected an Academician of the National Academy, where she has won the Joseph Isidor Medal, the Julius Hallgarten Prize, the Adolph and Clara Obrig Prize, and the Henry Ward Ranger Purchase Prize.

Brownings’s work is in the public collections of many museums, including the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Milwaukee Art Center, the St. Louis Art Museum, and the New York State Art Museum. She has been selected to exhibit in major museum exhibitions, such as the Whitney Museum in New York; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis; the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio; and the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.

Browning’s work has been the subject of articles in Time, Newsweek, Glamour, The New York Times, Arts magazine, Art International, and American Artist. She exhibits regularly at the Kennedy Galleries in New York and receently had a solo show at the Wichita Art Museum, Kansas.

In 2012, the Hudson Hills Press published a hardcover monograph on Browning’s work entitled Colleen Browning: The Enchantment of Realism. I haven’t purchased a copy yet, but I’m definitely tempted…

BONUS LINK:

TRANSISTORADIO > Colleen Browning, Night Garden Light (1981), oil on canvas, 116.8 x 127 cm.

Illustration Art · Jeffrey "Jeff" Catherine Jones · Look Here

Look Here: THE WORLD’S DESIRE by Jeffrey Jones

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Here’s a painting by Jeffrey Jones that I wanted to display on Transistoradio in close proximity to Arnold Bocklin’s In the Sea (1883), but all I could find online was a tiny image, so I scanned the reproduction in Jeffrey Jones: A Life in Art and posted it there, and now — lucky you! — I’ve decided to post it here, too:

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BONUS IMAGES:

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

Look Here: Two “Lovecraft” collections with cover art by John Holmes

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Picked up a stack of old paperbacks for cheap at a local book sale last week, including these two:

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BONUS SCAN (added later the same day):

Rescued from an ebay auction:

Keywords: The Shuttered Room and Other Tales of Horror by H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth; Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos: Volume 1, H. P. Lovecraft and Others, edited by August Derleth; John Holmes.

Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Illustration Art · Leo and Diane Dillon · Look Here

Look Here: Four more Ace SF Specials with cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon

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I’ve been a bit slow with new posts and scans here at RCN… been feeling a bit discouraged about a number of things… although TRANSISTORADIO seems to be doing okay, with 90 followers since 01 August 2013 and 1,732 notes on 368 (!) posts… but never mind all that… the show must go on…

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Keywords: Furthest by Suzette Haden Elgin, Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin, Chronocules by D. G. Compton, The Eclipse of Dawn by Gordon Eklund, Leo and Diane Dillon.

For more scans of book covers, etc., with art by Leo and Diane Dillon, click here and scroll down.

Art Collection · Comics · Here, Read · Look Here · Steven Weissman

Look Here: A savage “Barack Hussein Obama” strip by Steven Weissman

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This summer, my wife and I bought a page of original art from the online comic strip, “Barack Hussein Obama,” by Steven Weissman; the page, which is signed by the artist, is from an ongoing sequence that Steven began posting online in the spring of 2013 entitled “Looking for America’s Dog.” Here’s a scan:

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If I had to break it down, I would say that the first element that drew me to the above page was the opening panel with Barack Hussein Obama’s daughter Sasha in what has become an iconic pose/situation in the strip. Second was the beautiful use of blood-red design tone in the third panel. And third, the overall excellence of the timing of the words and pictures in the fight sequence.

A hardcover collection of Weissman’s “Barack Hussein Obama” was published by Fantagraphics in 2012, and I thought it was one of the best “graphic novels” of the year. If the “real” Barack Hussein Obama had lost the election in November of last year, the strip probably would have ended then and there. But Obama won, and Weissman has been posting new instalments ever since, with a view, I suppose, to a second collection — or perhaps simply a complete collection — at some point in the future.

Fans of first-rate cartooning — and screen/design tones! — can follow Barack Hussein Obama‘s surreal progress at What Things Do.

Original art by Steven Weissman is available for purchase via his bigcartel shop.

BONUS IMAGES:

From the collection, Barack Hussein Obama, page 33, via Flickr:

From the Stinckers blog, September 2012:

From the Stinckers Facebook photostream, October 2012:

Like I said… iconic…

P.S. You can shop for uncut production sheets and 3-packs of Stinckers on Etsy.

Album Covers · Illustration Art · John Berkey · Look Here

Look Here: Four more SF covers with monumental machines by John Berkey

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More covers, freshly scanned and displayed in order of publication:

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Jupiter and Star Science Fiction 4 are wraparound covers, but I’m not in the mood right now to do the scanning and stitching necessary to display the back, spine, and front of each book as a single image. Sorry…

Keywords: Star Science Fiction 4, edited by Frederik Pohl; Jupiter, edited by Carol and Frederik Pohl; The Humanoid Touch by Jack Williamson; Rendezvous by D. Alexander Smith; John Berkey.

Interlude · Listen Here · YouTube Finds

Interlude: Elvis Costello – “Sitting”

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Elvis Costello’s lovely cover of “Sitting” by Cat Stevens features in the soundtrack of an otherwise mediocre film by Ricky Gervais et al., The Invention Of Lying (2009). “Sitting” was originally written and recorded by Stevens for his album Catch Bull at Four.

The audio file above was created from this YouTube video.

Connections · Fine Art · Francis Bacon · Look Here

Connections: Francis Bacon (1967) and Francis Bacon (1978)

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Keywords: Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho (1967), Landscape (1978), Francis Bacon

Fine Art · Look Here · Salvador Dali

Look Here: MEMORIES OF SURREALISM by Salvador Dali

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Published in 1971 by Transworld Art, the print portfolio, Memories of Surrealism, is a fresh and lively distillation of the art of Salvador Dali. Working on an intimate scale, Dali here revisits the major themes and motifs of his art in a remarkably restrained, even analytical mood, and the happy result is a series of sketchbook-style studies that, even after the passage of forty-plus years, look like they could have been produced yesterday.

My understanding is that each of the twelve colour prints in the portfolio is an etching on a photo-lithograph of an original mixed-media work that Dali created with gouache and collage on paper. The prints were all signed by Dali in pencil and were issued unbound in a presentation case along with some descriptive text plates, and all etching plates and lithographic stones were destroyed before the portfolio was released to impose a hard limit on the edition. Enjoy!

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— VIA WBG & LSG —