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Harry Clarke did these majestic illustrations for Poe’s tales. I’ve seen them before but I forgot to post them up until recently. His work looks a lot like Beardsley’s and there’s no doubt that there was influence there! Find the rest here: http://50watts.com/Harry-Clarke-Illustrations-for-E-A-Poe
“Visitors were confronted with the skeletons of a child of four with a toy in its hands, a five-year-old holding a silk thread with an embalmed heart dangling from it, and a girl drying her eyes with a pocket handkerchief. Decorations, memento mori images and vanitas symbols put the horror of death in perspective by stressing the transience of life, by showing that the body was no more than an earthly frame for the soul. After death it no longer served its purpose – only an anatomist could still make it useful to the living.”
These are wonderful, wonderful images that embody the kind of feel I’m looking at. Something useful Astrid said in class the other day – my project could go for “an 1800s feel with a consciousness of contemporary work”.
Le Yeux du Chat by Moebius and Jodorowsky is one of my favourite short masterpieces ever. I’m sorely envious of this stellar example of wordless storytelling and I’m dying to bring my own illustrative style up to this kind of standard.
I’m thinking that storytelling will work for me. The bizarre works for me. And perhaps I could also try using monochromatic washes of colour? This is still my very early exploration so I haven’t exactly gone into specifics about what I want to do yet.
I got all the images off this original post.
I got my hands on a copy of The Resurrectionist by EB Hudspeth recently and this book exemplifies something of the direction I’d like to move in with regard to my FYP. The book incorporates the fictional biography of a mad scientist of sorts alongside the (also fictional) scientist’s codex into this wonderfully dark tome that makes you want to believe in the existence of the implausible creatures it presents.
The anatomical drawings are so inspiring and again there’s that tension between reality and fantasy (which to me is also an aspect of duality) which is what I’d like to incorporate in my storytelling in my project as well.
So far, I’ve only got a couple of things down: storytelling (stories within stories, blurring of reality and fantasy, mythology, bizarre anatomy/body horror.
I came across this series of photographs by Axel Dupeux of collector Ryan Matthew Cohn. It’d be a neat visual reference for all the bizarre images I want to incorporate.
The Rough & Ready Sideshow series from photographer Jason Mitchell and digital artist Stacey Ransom reinvents the vintage cabinet cards of yore with a colorful whimsy that is both alluring and bizarre.
To create the intricate details of these circus portraits, Ransom & Mitchell sew costumes, build sets and fabricate props, then digitally paint the final touches that couldn’t be done in studio.
— Cult Of Weird
I love the vintage freakshow/sideshow/circus look and the principle of it making you want to look twice at everything. I have an undeniable penchant for whatever is slightly creepy, bizarre or both and I’d also like to work this into the look of my project, at least where illustration and type styles are concerned. I don’t know if this is forcing it, but the normal/weird dichotomy going on (ha ha) might be something worth exploring too, at least in the visuals.
Scans from The Grotesque Factor, a book of illustrations and essays I got from the ADM Library.
“At Rest is a photographic series depicting roadkill on American highways and addressing our human fear of confronting death and viewing the dead. My images draw attention to the fact that, while man has a vast impact on animal and natural life, generally in American society, people are separate from wildlife and the souls of animals have little value. To cause the viewer to feel struck by this notion, I photograph memorials I have built surrounding roadkill at the location at which its life was taken. At Rest expresses the sacredness to the bodies of animals hit by vehicles while crossing the road. Statement revised 2014.”
I find this series oddly beautiful and macabre. In the same vein as my explorations on mortality, I’d say it isn’t necessary to do what I’ve been doing at the moment and make death all about skulls, etcetera (thanks, Vishaka, for the feedback). I could go with something macabre but this photo series is rather inspirational in that it makes death something more restful and memorializes the oft-ignored roadkill.
From The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration by Richard Barnett.
I love how the book cover and contents marry a more vintage illustrative style with modern sensibilities (use of the grid and sans-serif type). I’m interested to do something like this on a smaller scale for my project, perhaps to produce a book/booklet/magazine in this kind of vein.
Drew this as part of an exploration on the Gemini twins/mortality and time. I enjoy doing quite a bit of macabre-looking illustrations in my free time and I’m carrying that aesthetic over in my explorations just to see how it works out. I liked the idea of using Siamese twins to see how else Gemini could be represented.
