Jake Jackson's Blog, page 27

Barry Moser: Artist, Engraver, Storyteller.

Barry Moser’s incredible illustrated edition of Alice in Wonderland

“Barry Moser’s illustrations are exquisite beyond the telling. He soars at an altitude where only such wondrous birds of passage as Lynd Ward and Rockwell Kent have tasted the wind. The passion, craft and imagination of Moser’s work have an impact that leaves the viewer speechless.” Harlan Ellison, that brilliant, maverick writer of the fantastic, on one of my favourite arists, Barry Moser.

For me his engravings follow a powerful, meandering historical line that takes in Gustave Doré, Fuselli, William Blake, William Morris and, yes, Virgil Finlay, P. Craig Russell, Barrie Windsor Smith and Bernie Wrightson.  In terms of sensibility, I’d also include the ink and pencil drawings of Roy J Krenkel, Jeffrey Catherine Jones and the exquisite art of Michael Wm Kaluta. Moser’s particular skill is wood engraving but to the observer it’s the impact of those fierce lines and blocks of black ink that occupy the mind, however they were created.

I have a number of his works, the monumental King James Bible, a fabulous box set of Alice’s Adventures’ in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, also Moby Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Frankenstein and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. For me the Alice books in particular add a peculiar darkness that teases out the hidden desires and sub-consicous rantings of a male dominated Victorian society but all of Moser’s work exhibits a singular vision that engages and challenges. His art connects with the shadows in the corners of our lives, strikes at the the uncertainties and offers us a deeper insight. I’m not a religious person, but a life-long passion for mythology, ancient civilisations and storytelling has taught me that there’s so much still to learn. Moser dandles this in front of us and forces us to explore the inner narratives of humanity.

Moser is one of a number of contemporary artists whose work exists in a pure space. Whatever the other personal choices made, these artists are driven to create a body of work that exists beyond the immediacy of their lives as a superior achievement, an artistic legacy that is truly admirable because of the combination of skill and dedication. Some of these artists have earned their livings through commercial illustration, others by raising money through patrons, others by selling their own work, often a mix of all three. It is impossible for a true artist to guarantee to live in a time that truly appreciate their work, for every Picasso (that wiley old goat), there are many Van Goghs whose visions overwhelm the pragmatic choices of daily life. An artist is an artist, good or bad: driven, inarticulate, cantankerous, impervious and for those who are truly gifted the rewards are erratic, and directed mainly at the hereafter.

Barry Moser’s Pennyroyal Press has created a magnificent series of publications that highlight his work, but it is a struggle. Recently I discovered some engravings made for a book of Cowboy stories. As ever the mood is focused hard on the upper half of the bodies, often the face, with very little landscape. The observer has to reach hard into the black spaces, and the distinct absences of darkness, to find the meaning, the shadows, and spirit of an enigmatic sensibility.

Moser’s own website highlights his achievements and showcases many of his great works of art, illustration, design and typography.

Here’s a selection of images, from The Wizard of Oz, Moby Dick, Frankenstein,  the King James Holy Bible, Through the Looking Glass and Sony Brewer’s dark mystery, The Widow and the Tree.

     

Iron Man 3: Trailer

Coming next April, 2013, here’s a taster . I hope it reaches the heights of the first one, and the Avengers movie. Iron Man 2 had some fantastic technology, but there were too many guns for my taste (trailer and other information the official site here).

Fantastic Album covers of 2012

An Awesome Wave by Alt-J

The age of the fantastic album cover is dead. Discuss. Hmm. I grew up with LPs, those lovely 12 by 12 inch formats with magnificent artworks by Roger Dean for Yes (and others), and Hipgnosis for just about everyone else (Pink Floyd, Led Zep, Genesis etc). The most inventive covers drew us into the world of the music and beyond, offering a means of participating without actually playing. The move to CDs brought clarity and fidelity to the music but compromised the experience of buying, listening and exploring these extended worlds. The physicality of two sides of music, the turning of the LP from one side to the other, the immersive experience of the large covers and inside pages, was replaced by the more ephemeral format of the CD which could be left and played without intervention, on new stereo players that could be programmed to shuffle in an order not defined by the band or producer. It felt different, liberating, but the impact of the iconic cover was lost.

Now of course we have downloads, playlists, smartphones, internet radio (I love Last FM), Spotify and the ultimate in liberated, user-managed listening experiences. The consumer is king, the producer no longer exercises the same degree of control. The big record companies have suffered a fatal decline while bands like Marillion, Radiohead  and almost every artist on Myspace connects directly with its audience, rather than through the medium of the dilapidated High Street.

Well, this is true, but while CD sales themselves are in terminal decline, outsmarted by the generational shift to downloads, the LP is making a steady comeback because popular music is as much a visual as a musical phenomenon. The Pet Sounds, Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band and Grateful Dead’s American Beauty albums of the late Sixties carried iconic covers which resonated with their audience because they captured the zeitgeist. The power of these great album covers is that we hear the music as soon as we see the image, and remember how we felt. It’s hard to ignore the posed images of X-factor celebrities that focus on faddish good-looks, but truly fantastic covers can be found across the vast fields of modern listening tastes, from country, to neo-prog, death-metal, funk and electronica, there are still some fantastic covers to be discovered.

This is a personal selection, picked because of their fantasy element or mystery and intrigue. They are not meant to be the best covers, nor does their selection imply any comment on the music itself. At the head of this post is Alt-J’s An Awesome Wave featuring the amazing art of Belgian artist Wim Delvoye. Below are Zac Brown Band’s Uncaged, Muse’s The 2nd Law, The Killers’ Battle Born (note the lack of driver), Donald Fagan’s Sunken Condos (Jules Verne like in its dreamy underwater scene), Dethklok’s Dethalbum III and Porcupine Tree’s forthcoming live album with its steampunky cover, Octane Twisted.

The Hobbit: New Trailer

Really sorry, I couldn’t resist this. Here’s the new Hobbit trailer just released to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the book’s publication in 1937. I first read Tolkein’s quiet epic of high fantasy when I was nine. I don’t think I understood much of it until I read it again a couple of years later, but I remember loving every thrilling second of suspense. I suspect I identified with Bilbo, hopefully not Gollum. I am really glad to see Martin Freeman as the lead, he has a perfect balance of phlegmatic poise and near panic.

The cover image to the left is the edition I still have, an Unwin paperback bought second-hand in 1968.

Also, here’s a link to the brilliant Andy Serkis reading as Gollum, in the Fulham Palace Gardens, in West London, just close to where I work.

Total Recall. Trailer and Philip K. Dick

From Magazines to Movie Posters

The new movie version of Total Recall is coming soon and is further attempt to turn the fantastic ideas of Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) into celluloid. This one started as short story in April 1966’s ‘Science Fiction and Fantasy’ magazine, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”, but was transformed into the mega success of Schwarzenegger’s original and entertaining move, Total Recall in 1990.

Dick’s excellent short stories are responsible for a series of fantastic science fiction movies ranging from Blade Runner (1982) (based on “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”) and Minority Report (2002) (based on the short story of the same name) to A Scanner Darkly (2006) (also based on the same-named short story) to the more recent The Adjustment Bureau (2011) (based on “The Adjustment Team”)

You can find the text of the short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” here.

And here’s the trailer for the new film:

The Avengers: A Back Story

Avengers issues #1, #4, #16 and #18

The Avengers movie was fantastic. Bright, smart, powerful CGI but with some terrific acting and a story that held together really well. Now the third top-grossing movie of all time (and no DVD yet) it still has some life in it yet. I didn’t read the original comics when they first came out (too young and in the wrong country) but I did find them later as re-issues and collector’s items. Of course the movie reinvents the origins of this band of super heroes to meet the demands of modern taste and tie up some loose ends that hadn’t even been thought of in those early pioneering years of the 1960s. Although Iron Man, Thor and The Hulk fought Loki in the very first Avengers’ appearance, Iron Man didn’t have his fancy red and gold suit, Captain America did not appear until issue 4, Hawkeye came around in issue 16 and Natasha Romanov was introduced as Hawkeye’s devious beau in issue 18. Incidentally, the Goliath of issue 18 was a souped-up version of the original Ant Man who appeared in the first issue. How times have changed! For more info on Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s epic comic creations being turned into big-time movies there’s more here, and for details on Don Heck who took over the illustration work on the Avengers from Kirby by issue 9, and pencilled many of the original stories for Iron Man, Daredevil and the like, see here.

I hope you like this stuff! I’ll be looking at some more movie posters next.

Harry Harrison: A Fantastic Author. R.I.P.

Fantastic art by Harry Harrison, Wally Wood, Peter Relson, Don Maitz

Harry Harrison passed away in the last day or so. He lived long (born 1925) but will be much missed. His official website has been overwhelmed with tributes. I came to him quite late, with Skyworld in 1981, the third book after Homeworld and Wheelworld both of which I immediately ran out and bought from Forbidden Planet in, I think, New Oxford Street, London.

In the late 1940s Harrison started as an artist, studying at the Cartoonists and Illustrators school with an astonishing array of the great paperback and comic illustrators of his time: Roy Krenkel, Al Williamson, Wally Wood, John Severin and Mike Esposito amongst them. Later he and Wally Wood worked together, illustrating many of the EC horror, science fiction and fantasy comic titles. He even worked in the same studio of the legendary Frank Frazetta so his pedegree for the fantastic by the time of his first novel in the early 1960s, Deathworld, was well established. The Stainless Steel Rat, probably his most popular character started as a short story in ‘Astounding Fiction’ Magazine and went on to populate another 12 novels. As with many of his pulp predecessors Harrison’s novels started as serial fiction in the pulps, with Deathworld appearing in ‘Astounding Fiction’ in 1957. Harrison was an imaginative and inspirational writer whose colourful, inventive worlds will live in the foundations of science fiction forever.

TV series Trailer: Doctor Who

New series coming. At last. Doctor Who manages to run the roller-coaster ride of family popularity and sf credibility. The new doctors, from Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant and now Matt Smith have given a middling, cult series a fantastic international appeal. Obviously the Doctors themselves are simply the tip of the iceberg with brilliant teams of writers, producers and fellow actors. The old days of laughable wobbly sets are long gone and the Doctor Who team works very hard to create a believable universe with built-in longevity. The Doctor Who Fan site blog has some great material.

 

Frankenstein by Jeffrey Catherine Jones

Frankenstein painting © by Jeffrey Jones

Jeffrey Catherine Jones (January 10, 1944-May 19, 2011), known as Jeff Jones when she first came to prominence, was an exquisite, fluid and much under-rated artist. An associate of Bernie Wrightson, Michael Kaluta and Barry Windsor Smith (collectively they were The Studio in the late 70s, made famous by their incredible book, see here for more information), Jeff was a uniquely gifted artist who expressed himself through the medium of comic art and sword and sorcery paperback covers (ERB, Lin Carter etc), before making a determined turn to fine art in later years. By all accounts Jeff suffered from anxiety and depression before undergoing hormone therapy in 1998 and adopting the name Catherine at the age of 55. As with many others, I had a brief Facebook association and watched in awe as she uploaded a series of fantastic images in the last years of her life. This particular image (called ‘Frankenstein’s Monster Descends the Steps To the Laboratory’ and seems to be undated), with its misfit subject, distant perspective, sense of loneliness and the proximity of the main figure to an ambiguous exit perhaps reflects much of Jones’ own state of mind. Her later work features beautifully rendered single figures in various states of lament or melancholy in a style that sits somewhere between the brittleness of Klimt and the loose power of Frank Frazetta. As you can see, I’m a real fan. There are many other examples of Jeff’s work here.

Great Movie Posters: The Amazing Spiderman

Well, I didn’t want to see the reboot because I loved the first movies (1 and 3 anyway), but this is just great! Somehow more athletic and more sensitive. I liked the back story too, the search for PP’s parents, which added some depth to the story we all know. As a point of interest the picture here shows the original Marvel comic which launched Spiderman to the world, with a Jack Kirby cover, (although inside it was some lovely Steve Ditko illustration that brought the comic to life). For more news on the movie, go here. For more info on the original comic and a view of the inside pages, here.

He’s come a long way since 1962!