Only Connect: The Naming of Things: Part One

I’ve been painting most nights: acrylics, layer upon layer, broadly expressionist, abstract, intimate. But one thing troubles me: what do I call the paintings? You’d think it would be simple, but the ‘naming of things’ is not to be undertaken lightly. With its immediacy a painting seems to be different to a book, or a piece of music, and not …

Echoes & Origins – Painting & Writing

I’ve started painting again. Ten years ago I put my easel under the bed, for good reasons at the time (children, space, lack of inspiration, life, blah). But now it’s out and dominating my energies late at night in that gap between feeling tired and actually forcing myself up to bed. Although I write in the mornings at the weekend, …

Only Connect: J. Allen St. John

J. Allen St. John was a fine golden age illustrator of fantastic worlds, early adventure fantasy and science fiction. He is most famous for his Tarzan and John Carter of Mars art for Edgar Rice Burrough’s (ERB’s) famous work in novel and pulp magazine form but his influences include Roy G. Krenkel and the imperious Frank Frazetta and he lived through one of the most poerful periods of change in human cultural history.

Italian Futurism, These Fantastic Worlds

Only Connect: Fantastic Futurism

“Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday.” So announced Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s in his 1909 ‘Fondazione e Manifest del Futurismo’ (The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism). Along with all other forces of Modernism the Futurists were both agents and reflections of the change in Western …