new work...

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"Lady Asterisk"...

Austin Osman Spare...

Gynander: Mutation by Besz-Mass (1955).

via
{ feuilleton }

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili...in dreams...

'Each one was divided at the groin, whereupon her fleshy thighs separated.'

 

The enigmatic, polyglot Hypnerotomachia Poliphili has fascinated architects and historians since its publication in 1499. Part fictional narrative and part scholarly treatise, richly illustrated with wood engravings, the book is an extreme case of erotic furor, aimed at everything -- especially architecture -- that the protagonist, Poliphilo, encounters in his quest for his beloved, Polia. Among the instances of the book's manifesto-like character is Polia's tirade defending the right of women to express their own sexuality, probably the first sustained argument of this type, which lifts the book's erotic theme from the realm of ribaldry to the more daring one of sexual politics.printed by Aldus Manutius Venice: 1499

 

 

Eros and the Metaphor of the Architectural Body

 
The name Poliphilo means "lover of many things." The name Polia, in turn, means "many things." And to be sure, Poliphilo does love many things besides Polia. ...But he loves architecture most: he loves it as much as he loves Polia, in the same carnal way. One after the other, the buildings in the book become objects of desire, metaphors for Polia’s solido corpo.

Indeed, among the dreamlike features of the buildings is the inordinate feeling of happiness they impart to the beholder. Poliphilo characterizes the marble of the triumphal arch as "virginal," the veinless marble of another surface as "flawless," which is the sma eterm he uses to describe the skin of a certain nymph. Upon seeing the buildings, Poliphilo feels "extreme delight," "incredible joy," "frenetic pleasure and cupidinous frenzy". The buildings fill him with the highest carnal pleasure" and with "burning lust." He loves them not just because they are beautiful to behold, but also because they are fragrant and agreeable to touch. He partakes of their pleasures with all his senses. In front of the frieze of a sleeping nymph, he cannot keep from plcing his hand on her knees and "fondling and squeezing" them, nor can he resist pressing his lips to her breasts and sucking them.

The sexuality of the buildings Poliphilo loves is polymorphic. He approvingly describes the column of a certain temple as "hermaphrodotic," because they combine male and female characteristics. The altar of Bacchus is made of darkly veined marble especially selected to express the virility of that deity, and it is carved with a grat phallus "rigidly regorous." Above the reclining nude body of a sleeping nymph leers a naked satyr with a watchful eye and an erect penis.

This erotization of architecture comes to its logical conclusion. In three cases, Poliphilo manages to locate the appropriate orifice through which he can engage in sexual congress with particular buildings. His response, always described at length and in great detail, is sheer coital ecstacy. In one case, the effect on the building is mutual. Liane Lefaivre

 

"The Nymph Polia perceiuing well the change of my colour and blood comming in more stranger sort than Tripolion or Teucrion, thrise a day changing the colour of his flowers, and my indeuoring to sende out scalding sighes deeply set from the bottome of my hart, she did temper and mitigate the same with hir sweete and friendly regards, pacifieng the rage of my oppressing passions, so as notwithstanding my burning minde in these continuall flames and sharpe prouocations of loue, I was aduised patiently to hope euen with the bird of Arabia in hir sweet nest of small sprigs, kindled by the heate of the sunne to be renewed."

HYPNEROTOMACHIA

I Am Still the Great Isis! ...

Odilon Redon (1840 - 1916)

Je suis toujours la grande Isis! Nul n'a encore soulevé mon voile! Mon fruit est le soleil! (I Am Still the Great Isis! Nobody Has Ever Yet Lifted My Veil! My Fruit Is the Sun!) from La Tentation de Sainte-Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony) (plate XVI)1896

The majority of Redon's lithographs are found in albums based on thematic or literary subjects. He was greatly inspired by such authors as Edgar Allan Poe and Gustave Flaubert, whose unusual sensibilities were well suited to the artist's own. Redon was so moved by Flaubert's 1874 prose poem The Temptation of Saint Anthony that he created three separate projects based on it.

untitled...2009

*dedicated to Justin King, in loving memories

Tadanori Yokoo...

Tadanori Yokoo (born 1936) is a Japanese graphic designer, illustrator, printmaker and painter.

Tadanori Yokoo, (pronounced "yoko-o") born in Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, in 1936, is one of Japan's most successful and internationally recognized graphic designers and artists. He began his career as a stage designer for avant garde theatre in Tokyo. His early work shows the influence of the New York based Push Pin Studio (Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast in particular) but Yokoo himself cites filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and writer Yukio Mishima as two of his most formative influences.

www.tadanoriyokoo.com

Matsumoto Toshio > MONA LISA 1973

Elisabeth Collins...

Woman by the Sea circa 1945

The Man in Half-Armour circa 1945

A Woman Reading in a Pond circa 1945

Elisabeth Collins once explained her somewhat episodic painting career by asserting that ‘living and people come first’. Her marriage to a fellow artist, Cecil Collins, entailed her loving gift to him of much of her time and energy for the 58 years they were together: he acknowledged her as the inspiration of his life and work, the Lady and the Angel in his paintings.

She overcame some family opposition to become a sculpture student at Leeds School of Art before going on to continue her sculpture studies in London. She met Cecil Collins soon after starting at the Royal College of Art in the 1920s, and they were married as students in 1931. They moved to the country, first to a simple cottage in Buckinghamshire where Elisabeth fetched their water from a well and Eric Gill was one of their neighbours. Years later she recalled: ‘We only had £5 a week, which was my allowance from my parents. It was enough if you lived in obscurity, and we preferred it that way… Living the way we did had real quality.’

The Collins’ met the American artist Mark Tobey in 1936, and were invited by him to come and live near the idealistic community founded by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst at Dartington. Dartington, like the Cornish School in Seattle, aimed to provide an opportunity for a co-ordinated study of all the arts – music, dance, theatre, drawing and painting. Elisabeth and Cecil made many friends and gradually became more involved with the community. At the outbreak of the War they moved to Dartington itself, where Cecil became director of the Art Studio Workshop after the internment of the German artist and designer Hein Heckroth.

This was a significant and productive period of their lives. For Elisabeth, the communal pooling of domestic chores like cooking and washing released time for her to paint, encouraged by Tobey and his innovative drawing classes. Tobey believed that by making an effort to express their ideas on paper, his students were ‘freeing’ themselves, ‘opening up great powers for living the life of the artist within us all’. Elisabeth responded with an outpouring of magical gouaches and drawings – naïve, yet sophisticated and strangely charming. Her pictures depicted a colourful, dreamlike world, once described as being from ‘the Eastern European fairy-tale province of her imagination’. It was an image in one of Elisabeth’s early drawings, The First Fool, that inspired Cecil Collins’ great series of works on the theme of the Fool – to him a symbol of ‘purity of consciousness’.

In 1943 the Collins’ left Dartington, and moved to Cambridge, where Elisabeth occasionally exhibited some of her gouache paintings under the name ‘Belmont’ as a way of keeping her work independent of Cecil’s growing reputation. His 1944 London exhibition at the LeFevre Gallery had received great acclaim, and his seminal essay The Vision of the Fool, was published in 1947.

In 1951 Cecil Collins was offered a teaching post at the Central School of Art in London, and for many years travelled from Cambridge several days a week. Later he and Elisabeth moved to London, where they shared a house in Chelsea with the writer and poet Kathleen Raine – Elisabeth and Cecil lived in their own top floors of the house for the rest of their lives. Their home became a focus for a wide circle – composers, writers, poets, artists, and Cecil’s students and admirers. Cecil painted in the studio room below, while Elisabeth worked on their dining table, making small drawings and gouaches on scraps and fragments of paper she had saved; and writing letters in her distinctive idiosyncratic handwriting (always in red ink).

After Cecil’s death in 1989, Elisabeth began to use a corner of his studio, keeping her numerous small works in progress hidden under a piece of cloth. Often she would find an early drawing or watercolour and start to work on it again many years later, saying that she now knew what was wrong with it. She would often put a work which she was still thinking about into a frame and hang it on the stairs for a time, ‘to wait and let colours settle… often all sorts of things emerge.’

The years on her own became a period when Elisabeth produced a substantial amount of her small-scale gouache paintings: colourful, poetic fantasies, imbued with a quirky wit. Even in her eighties and nineties, when she had developed a slight tremor, and drew and wrote with an almost quavering ink line, this became part of their charm. She was still able to make a face come alive and express a variety of emotions with a few incisive ink lines over the layers of watercolour and gouache. She said that ‘in each face, you strike what is the chief message or feeling, as you do when you’re talking to people. It’s important to keep clear the channels of understanding.’ She sometimes talked of ‘the kind of painting I feel sympathy for – the wonderful luminous quality of Redon’, and there are some affinities in her work with the Russian folkloric art of Chagall, Larianov and early Kandinsky.

In 1989 Elisabeth had an exhibition at the Albermarle Gallery to coincide with Cecil’s Retrospective at the Tate – a double celebration of their life and work. In 1996 her exhibition at England & Co led to the acquisition of four works by the Tate Gallery, which gave her great pleasure, although she was characteristically modest about it. A memorial exhibition, Elisabeth Collins 1904-2000: Works from the Studio, was held at England & Co in 2002.

Jane England

The Fool circa 1930

Cecil Collins circa 1930

Fool Thinking in a Landscape c1938

Magical Etching c1939

Ithell Colquhoun...magick works..

Ithell Colquhoun

"Scylla" 1938

Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) is best known today for being a painter and author of great prominence on the British surrealist scene. She studied at the Slade School of Art in London and soon also studied the arts in France, and there met the master Salvador Dalí which made a great impact on her artistic expression. She made her debut at a exhibition in 1936 and by then already had developed her style which she herself described as "magic realism", showing strong influences of Dalí.

From 1939 and onwards Ithell often used a technique which can best be described as "automatic painting", i.e. the artistic equivalent of automatic writing, not uncommon amongst surrealist painters such as her mentor Salvador Dalí. It was also used amongst certain symbolist painters and writers, such as the Golden Dawn Adept William Butler Yeats. This is also a technique which naturally can be found in some occult circles, which leads us to Ithell's connections with the occult community, in which she was known as Soror Splendidior Vitro (see monogram at far right for this magical motto). Ithell in fact took part in the movement today commonly known as the Golden Dawn. There she used her artistic abilities in full bloom to express its occult worldview, especially connected to the Qabalistic glyph of the Tree of Life.

In the Golden Dawn community Ithell is best known to us for her seminal work and personal interpretation of the history of the Golden Dawn, called The Sword of Wisdom: MacGregor Mathers and the Golden Dawn. This book, which basically is a biography on S.L. MacGregor Mathers, was published by Spearman in 1975 and is currently out of print. Compared to the more academically rigid and hence dispassionate works of authors like Ellic Howe and R.A. Gilbert, the work of Ithell Colquhoun is written with love and passion for the tradition and from the perspective of an initiate. This makes the work the more interesting as it draws from many sources not strictly speaking legitimate from the academic angle, such as word of mouth traditions and gossip amongst initiates, etc.

Ithell also wrote one more occult work, the hermetic-surrealist novel Goose of Hermogenes, published by Peter Owen in 1961. This work was probably developed under the influence of automatic writing, or so Steve Nichols asserts us, and can be best regarded as a modern oracle. In short Ithell's heroine finds out, while visiting her uncle at his island that exists out of time and space, that he actually is in search of the philosopher’s stone. Goose of Hermogenes can best be described as an esoteric fantasy novel which draws from scenes and imagery mostly derived from medieval occult sources. Each chapter title is also correlated to different stages in the alchemical work. It is a reading worth while for any student of the Golden Dawn or of Hermeticism.SR

her magical works..

more to follow...