Computer Animation Arts

Wallace Smith (1888 - 1937) provided these striking, agonised illustrations for Ben Hecht's Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath - a work of "vigorous grotesquerie and misanthropy"  .   First published in 1922 as a limited run, most copies of the book were destroyed by the powers-that-be on grounds of obscenity.  Smith's illustrations recall the dazzle of surface and complexity of line of Harry Clarke .

With all the fascinating character work-up stuff populating the blogs at the moment, I thought I'd showcase the work of 'Alastair' - otherwise known as Baron Hans H enning Voigt.   It's quirky, macabre, sinuous and a bit menacing somehow... "An artist, composer, dancer, mime, poet, singer and translator, Alastair was a fascinating and elusive personality, and perhaps best known as a gifted illustrator of the fin-de-siecle period. Officially born of German nobility in 1887 to the family of Von Voigt, and later mysteriously acquiring the title of Baron, Hans Henning Voigt was an enigma. He claimed to be a changeling…the spawn of an illegitimate union between a hot headed Bavarian prince and a pretty Irish lass…  Although clearly influenced by the sinister, serpentine style of Aubrey Beardsley , with echoes of the deliciously unhinged work of Harry Clarke , and a bit of the occult grotesquery of Austin Osman Spare’s art ...

Out there in the CGAA community, students are taking on the literary heavyweights - Oscar Wilde, H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. As authors dealing with heightened moods and feverish visions, their respective works lend themselves to strong stylisation and gothic excess. Poe's rather nasty 1845 short-story, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar , depicts the gloopy consequences of keeping an otherwise dead body 'alive' via the power of mesmerism; said consequences are outlined in this squishy concluding passage: "As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of "dead! dead!" absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once—within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk—crumbled—absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity." Nice. Below is another illustration by Harry Clark...

Harry Clarke was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1889. He apprenticed to his father in stained glass at the age of 16. From 1910 to 1913 he attended the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, where he won 3 gold medals and 2 scholarships. Clarke is celebrated for his stain glass window designs , but it is his wonderfully textural illustrations for the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe that I'm showcasing him here. For those of a literary persuasion, the titles accompanying Clarke's illustrations are hyperlinked to their respective stories. Be sure to take a really close-up look at Clarke's illustrations - the detail is extraordinary. The Fall of the House of Usher The Masque of the Red Death The Pit & The Pendulum The Tell-Tale Heart Ligeia A Descent into the Maelstrom The Premature Burial