Stuff of Nightmares

So, this is apparently the week when I steal inspiration from my friends.  I got an email this morning pointing me towards Juxtapoz Magazine’s blog post about Takato Yamamoto’s amazing artwork, and ever since I’ve been obsessed, doing nothing but look through page after page of his paintings. This was rendered slightly sketchy, due to the fact that I was at work and a great deal of his pieces are inspired by Japanese rope bondage and S&M. I kept accidentally clicking on the bad ones just as my supervisor was walking by. Sigh.

Disregard of being thought the office perv aside, what attracts me so much to Yamamoto’s paintings is the dreamlike combination of elements to be found in them. As I said, a lot of them draw inspiration from S&M (not many of the ones I’ve put up here, as I didn’t have time to study those as much to see if I liked them.) The influence of that and other erotica is definitely felt, but I’m much more interested in the images from folklore and horror conventions. The drawing style also reads to me as quintessentially Japanese, the tight lines and small details simultaneously evoking things as wide-ranging as horror manga, tattoo art and Hokusai. I love the use of anatomy, the organic details, the mysterious looming presence of the moon. I also love the intensity and simplicity of his palette (which I just wrote as palate– though with drawings like these one might wonder if he can stomach things, or if he is plagued by the monsters he creates.)

I’ve put up a lot of pictures, but it was very hard to edit it down to even this. I strongly urge you to go look at his works elsewhere and see what other things he has to offer. Everything is basically along these lines, but the variations can be rather glorious.

 

Horror take on Little Red Riding Hood. I love it, queasily. Look at the blood spatters on the post and her leg. I’m so curious, but I’m not even sure I want to know what happened there.

He makes it weirdly beautiful, right?

The blog post also features a pretty interesting interview with him, so I urge you to check it out.

{via 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}

Vintage Vogue Covers: 1913-1919

I was snooping about through the Condé Nast Website when I saw that they had copies of their old covers for sale. The entire selection was most definitely covet-worthy, but what particularly obsessed me were the covers from the nineteen-teens. They give such an interesting look into the world of the time. The illustrations, mainly by Helen Dryden and George Wolfe Plank, are stunningly beautiful by themselves, but it is the subject matter that particularly fascinates me. It’s beautiful to see the profusion of exotic themes, and the prevalence of mythological and folkloric elements. I objectively knew that these were the trends of the decade, but it’s a whole other matter to see them in full colour and to actually imagine women buying these magazines and inserting some of this style into their lives.

I had a little thought process about the lack of any reference to major events of the time period– namely, World War 1– but then I realised that I actually found it reassuring to see Vogue stick so firmly to its escapist guns. Import from France banned? No issue! Fashion goes on.

Leon Bakst

I’m a not-so-closet ballet devotee. I’m amazed by the strength dancers have, and the incredible grace and control they have over their bodies. This interest coupled perfectly with my love of Russian history to allow me to discover the designs of Leon Bakst, one of the major set and costume designers for the Ballets Russes.

I first discovered Bakst while spending the summer studying Russian in St. Petersburg. During the White Nights Festival, theatre, opera and ballet tickets are ridiculously cheap. I took the opportunity to glut myself on culture, attending a different perfomance every night and emerging afterwards into a magical world where the sun still blazed overhead at eleven pm. The atmosphere combined perfectly into an aura of fairytale. I made a lot of ballet converts that summer. In the middle of this, I found myself talking to one of my Russian teachers about my theatre-going experiences. She replied that I must, then, know about the Ballets Russes. When I confessed my ignorance, she shook her head impatiently, frog-marched me to the library and thrust a book on the subject into my hand. The book fell open at the illustration above and I fell in love.

Bakst’s work is redolent of the magic of the theatre for me. It carries all the imaginative, folkloric qualities that so seduced me the first time I went to a performance as a child. Looking at his work makes me think of a peek into the Arabian nights or a book of Russian fairy tales, rich and over-the-top with precisely the right amount of fantasy and humour. Added to all of that is the incredible lushness of his colours and the amount of detail he went in to with his designs. I could go on about him– and the Ballet Russes in general, for tha matter– at greater length, but I’ll stop here and let the designs speak for themselves.

Above image: Nijinsky, for L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune

Costume design for Tamara Karsavina in The Fire-bird

The Fire-Bird

Le Dieu Bleu, Bayadere with Peacock.

Le Dieu Bleu, the Bride.

Le Sultan Samarcande

Le Sultan Vindicatif

Narcisse Bacchante

Sadko

from Scheherazade

from Scheherazade

The Wolf from Sleeping Beauty.

[via]

Catch the Stars

This illustration is the epitome of perfection for me right at this moment: folkloristic in style and subject, with a vague hint of scifi. The image is simple and romantic, and leaves open an inifite possibility of stories. I’m itching to write it now.

From dkim.