An illustration somewhat reminiscent of the abstraction of The Vienna Secession, art by French Illustrator/Comic book artist Philippe Caza (born 1941) another prominent Heavy Metal contributor. Caza as with contemporaries Moebius, Phillippe Druillet and Enki Bilal offer’s a very idiosyncratic often stunning style…
See some more of his work here: http://www.twilightsite.com/Fantasy/Old/Caza/Caza.html
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Apologies for the lack of activity as of late… Here’s an expansion on Netherlandish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525 – September 9, 1569)
The top image is a scan of an Occult/Supernatural charity-shop-book-special; by special I mean that is seems there’s always a surplus of these type of books, be it ufo’s, unsolved mysteries or archaeological anomalies. The cover featured here dates from 1974 and is the GB edition of “Encylopedia of Superstitions” a hardback which chronicles fabled British superstions from Adder’s Tounge’s & Apples to YellowHammer’s & Yew Tree’s (no Z’s are listed)…
The jacket design by Ralph Mabey is a coloured reworking of a Sixteenth Century engraving composed by Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder entitled “The Sabbath” depicting Saint James the Elder combating the diabolical enchantments of a sorcerer. Pieter Brueghel was a printmaker and painter, best known for his landscapes and particularly for his depictions of Dutch / Flemish Peasant scenes. In fact one of his best example’s ‘Netherlandish Proverbs’ (1559) has just been recycled into sleeve art for Seattle based indie/folk group the Fleet Foxes (below).
Netherlandish Proverbs (also known as The Blue Cloak or The Topsy Turvy World) depicts a land populated with literal renditions of Flemish proverbs of the day. Of the 100 or so featured several have now faded to become archaic though many have since transmigrated into English and are in common usage, see if you can spot: “swimming against the tide”, “big fish eat little fish”, “banging one’s head against a brick wall” and “armed to the teeth”. Interesting also to note that the Fleet Foxes sleeve in fact won the MTV:UK 2008 Album Art Prize, presumably Pieter picked up the prize posthumously….. See the full original art here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bruegel_Proverbs.jpg
Pieter Bruegel the Elder is also famous for paintings such as his brooding depictions of The Tower of Babel – see and read more about him here @ Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Brueghel_the_Elder
As I’ve been a bit slack with posting as of late, here’s a multi-image selection from big time Sci-Fi-O-Rama favourite; Spanish 70′s/80′s Sci-Fi book cover artist Salinas Blanch. Unfortunately I still know very little about Salinas himself, though his supreme neon-fauvist-airbrushing-style will always have a home here! If you’d like see a full gallery of his work and more do check the link below…
Image’s via flickr user C. Rancio has a collection of 30 covers here: http://is.gd/iFqu
A selection of artwork from another prominent French Comic Artist and Heavy Metal contributor Enki Bilal, whose career spans right back to the start of the 1970′s. His style’s fairly similar to that of Moebius in that it’s very much charaterised by gorgeous and elaborate costume design, although It actually reminds me more of the work of Russ Nicholson (I will post more Russ soon!) anyway read a bit more about Enki here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enki_Bilal
Images via this large French fan site: http://bilal.enki.free.fr/
I thought I’d add a quick post as an addendum to previous 2001 Space Odyssey post’s I featured late last year – http://www.sci-fi-o-rama.com/2008/12/10/2001-a-space-odyssey-1/ & http://www.sci-fi-o-rama.com/2008/12/11/2001-a-space-odyssey-2/
basically here’s a collection of further reading / Cool stuff.
First up some links regarding the late Harry Lange a former NASA Illustrator whom Kubrick employed due to his extensive astronautical design experience. Harry helped to produce authentic prop and set designs, a sample of his concept art is above.
Read about Harry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Lange_(film_designer) and via his official site here: http://www.harry-lange.org.uk/index.html which has a page dedicated to all the major book’s on Kubrick’s masterpiece http://www.harry-lange.org.uk/products/products.html
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Also of major interest and extremely cool: Joe Mackenzie’s nicely designed tribute site http://www.halproject.com/ which includes the chance to download your very own Hal-9000 screen saver! basically whilst running it will show random samplings of the HAL 9000 monitor animations, very authentic and strangely calming… it’s available for Mac or PC and it’s completely Free!
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And finally… I came across these well rendered 2001 Desktop Icon’s at zyotism.com… So you can now have one of the Discovery’s Pod’s as your Hard Drive Icon! http://www.zyotism.com/aesthetics/iconsets/2001/index.html
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Update: April 2009 - More Resources / Interest at http://www.simonatkinsoncreativearts.com/ – Thanks for the tip Simon!
