arthur rackham (pix obv)

Where is the exhibit? I love Rackham! We used to have his prints all over the walls when I was a wee tot. I loved them, yet they vaguely creedped me out, yet at the same time I loved the complex other world which they portrayed... all thickets and thorns and beautiful fairygirls trapped in awful predicaments.

dulwich somewhere (vick knows, i don't)

(and i can't get hold of her at the moment)

Is Dullwich a real place? I once ****ed a drummer who claimed to be from Dullwich, I thought that he made it up. ;-)

it's just beyond borehamwood

i maintain that his dragons are too small:

http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/images/ardragon.jpg

(have fun mark - hope you ogle nonstop and so does dr vick)

(Sorry for repetition from the weekend thread)

All the google results show this exhibition ended last Sunday (02.03.03). The links on Dulwich Picture Gallery's exhibition page are broken so you can't check there to see if it has been extended. I would ring them before setting off if I were you!

vick says it closes on monday, but thanks i'll double check 2moro

OK it was on and we went, so that is good.

We talked about it a lot, not least cz I think we both found it a bit disappointing. The selection was kind of "one picture from every beloved book" plus some other stuff he did in down-time. This meant you never got a sense of how he approached any given project (how much was his decision, how much the publishers)
(eg did they say "we need ten colour plates and little beginning and end ink drawing for each of 12 chapters", or did he read the book and say "i'm going to do ten colour plates and little beginning and end ink drawing for each of 12 chapters")

(what are those kinds of drawings called btw?)

One of the captions talked about his "bold colours": *ahem* bold maybe in the sense that it is bold to do everything as a symphony in tinted sepia... i think his sense of light is amazing, and i wd like to know if *this* is something he developed himself (my guess) or absorbed from elsewhere... my theory is that his boldness actually comes in his shifts of SCALE, bcz he had a total gift for very dynamic figures drawn totally tiny, like the lilliputian dog which barks at gulliver all tied up, it is so funny and doggy and actually the hero of the entire picture, except it is barely more than a DOT!)

(haha i inducted dr vick into the War on Influence: one of the panels said "AR was influenced by Durer" => like who the fuck ISN'T!! sheesh... anyway, if they had said more abt eg richard doyle and cruikshank and and greenaway and beardsley and the pre-raphs and h.j.ford and other lesser knowns this wd at least have been a helpful contextualisation; plus some info on how a children's book was put together in 1890, 1910, 1930 etc: was he the exception or the best of the rules?...)

as with so many victorian gents (beardsley the somewhat unexpected exception) he is lame and becalmed and frightened when drawing winsome pretty chiXors* and cute widdle kids, and animated and brilliant when displacing all the stuff he daren't attribute to women or children, drawing knobby old trees and goblinkins and medusa-pubic shadow-terrorz, esp. in his stuff for midsummer night's dream, where the humans are prissy and the embodied hormones (=faeries, woods etc) are FEARFUL. Also Bottom with an ass's head: you see how horrible oberon's joke is, and how miserable bottom is being made...

(*the girl who is really a cat in aesop is an interesting exception)

Successors: W. Heath Robinson, ok we knew that probbly. But M. C. Escher!! (cf the soldiers caught in briars that he draw for cinderalla, during WW1: really just one soldier's hand, and then loops and whorls of pitiless brambles...)

geeta look!