Falling Down the Rabbit Hole in May

I must say I find this 1945 illustration – the image for May in my Vogue 2014 calendar – by Eugène Berman rather strange and surreal. I am sure it must owe something to Salvador Dalí’s influence. This illustration was chosen for the July 1945 issue of Vogue, the Sea and Country Number.

There are flowers here in the style of Victorian scrapbooking diecuts, and the image is autumnal in tone, but the whole effect is rather gory. The colour is distinctly reminiscent of raw meat, and are those splatters of blood around the edges? Both elements have a rather alarming effect. Perhaps the War had some influence here too.

I am not familiar with Berman’s work, but he and his brother Leonid were Russian Neo-Romantic painters, as well as theatre and opera designers. They fled revolutionary Russia in 1918 for Paris; Eugène left for New York in 1935. His work featured neo-classical elements – lonely landscapes populated with sculptures and architectural features. These were very much in the visceral and energetic style of this illustration, and certainly reminiscent of Dalí.

I very much enjoy surrealism though, especially when it takes the form of strange and adventurous dreams – or real life escapades that make you feel like you’ve fallen down the rabbit hole. Here’s to an intriguing May!

Happy April, No Fooling

Sports & Summer Fashions, June 1930. Illustration by Eduardo Benito.Happy April! One day late! That was my little April Fool’s joke … Actually I couldn’t tear myself away from the drawing board to go to the computer – I am feeling so retro these days, making art the traditional way.

I do like the blithe and airy mood of this illustration by the Spaniard Eduardo Benito, the April page on my Vogue calendar. This looks like it has been painted in gouache, in a very painterly and relaxed style.

I remember learning how to use this medium at TAFE (an intermediary tertiary college in between high school and art college), and owing to our lecturer’s obsession with flat planes of colour, it was also a medium difficult to master. Apparently, the only way to paint with gouache was in a very graphic style of simple shapes and flat areas of colour – not only flat in terms of no shading (or perhaps, imperceptibly graduating colour was allowed), but NO brushmarks were permitted to be visible. We were marked on that. I hated it.

So this Benito illustration is quite liberating. It perfectly suits the carefree pastime of running elegantly (jumper insouciantly tossed around your shoulders) beside your lissom greyhound, tossing a ball.

Have a lovely and carefree month Snapettes.

A (Star)Light Touch

I came across this Georges Lepape illustration today while flipping through a fashion magazine. Isn’t it lovely? There is such a delicacy of touch in it – it looks like Lepape has used pencil, with perhaps a watercolour wash.

I haven’t seen it before (it’s more usual to see covers rather than editorial illustrations in books on vintage illustration), so it’s great that magazines are dipping into their archives and exposing these treasures to the light of day. Or the starlight as in this case. 

Man in Astrakhan

I was trawling through my computer archives the other night looking for a scan of an old oil pastel illustration (I didn’t find it). I did find however this fashion drawing I created in the 90s, of a man wearing an astrakhan-lapelled quilted robe and red silk scarf, à la the dandified fashions of the nineteenth century.

This looks like a mixed-media piece in ink and oil pastel, and I am not sure if it was a life drawing, or whether I was using a fashion photograph as reference. He does look a little like a Jean Paul Gaultier model. Whatever the case, I like this rather powerful drawing. I did a pretty good job on the astrakhan too, if I may say so myself! 

The Barbèd Shafts of Disappointment

Yesterday’s howls reminded me of an illustration that I made when I was at art college. We had to design a book cover, and I chose the Signet Classic edition of The Selected Poetry of Keats.

There was a certain passage in the long poem Endymion that I chose to focus on:

“One morn she left me sleeping: half awake
I sought for her smooth arms and lips, to slake
my greedy thirst with nectarous camel draughts;
but she was gone. Whereat the barbèd shafts
of disappointment struck in me so sore
that out I ran and searched the forest o’er.”

There was such anguished loss and passion in those lines that I wanted to capture. I chose oil pastel as my medium (one of my favourites) and a heavy, almost crude style in an effort to convey that raw emotion – the cry of despair, Endymion clutching at his hair, and the woman’s complete indifference in the background. I suspect not a little is owed to Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream, a picture that never fails to strike me in the guts with its power.

This is a scan of a colour photocopy (I kept the mockup of the cover on the original book, which is still on my shelves), and I remember I was disappointed in the quality – there was much more subtlety of shade and tone in the drawing. Just looking at it is making my fingers itch to pick up the oil pastels again!