This is an amazing image from David Kunzle's great great book, the Early Comic Strip 1450-1825, that extends the whole comic book history and morphology back back way beyond Toppfer. I cant get over the castles in this image they look so 1960's so much like illustration from that era, with the same casual attitude to accuracy and the same isometric-ish perspective. The man that drew this was professionally known as the "Master of the Gardens of Love" a powerful title in an age when the whole concept of romantic love was still in its infancy. It's interesting too, to discover an artist who's work all revolved around this one metaphorical place, the 'Garden of Love' who's task was to interpret and transfer complex emerging emotive desires and passions and depict them, empowers them and paradoxically allows romantic love to lodge itself in the medieval mind and crucially the hearts of medieval men and women. Subversive stuff.
Here's my son entering the oldest part of the originally Iron Age settlement at Carn Euny over in Penwith. This Fogou (Cornish for cave) is
so atmospheric. I reckon that Hal is about the size of an iron age man, he's 8 and so i wanted him to walk though the entrance and then i'd have some sense of scale if i ever drew this place. He really looks the part ! Good work Hal.
Most of my research at the moment revolves around an illustrated book project set in the 14th century in medieval Beverley, this is the town where i was born. I think i have managed to get almost all the reference i need now, from the British Museum and the Museum of London in the main. I tend to adopt a super trawler approach to museum visits and take photos of every single potentially useable object
and then look through them all later at home, i'll take a shot of the artefact and then one of the card with its details on.
I love these keys, not so muchthat i love them as artefacts,i just love teir potentail to inform my drawings, i really want the detail in them to make the difference, and these keys designs are way beyond my own imagination, i think its little things like these keys that will make it all come alive in the readers mind and that is my main aim for this project.
This is slightly odd, its the throne in West minster Abbey, the one under which the Stone of Schoon used to be stashed. But the shadows are strange. The two figures here could not of been there, i mean they could but the throne is displayed very high up, i had to hold the cmera above my head to get this shot.Anyway... i love the text on her the type is amazing, not what you think of as medieval script, thats what i was trying to get a shoy of generations of kingly noble scrawl.
Over the summer while staying in Corfu i took a trip with my family to The Archaeological Museum and
was
very impressed by this intelligent and by todays standards perhaps a
little old fashioned museum. The exhibits were really able to speak for
themselves, here amply illustrated by this photo of the Tympanum from
the Temple of Artemis (600 bc - Archaic Period) with two helpful
volunteers to indicate the scale of it.
While not directly related to the research i've been doing about medieval sculpture, the stone carving here in particular the archaic work did interest me immensely. I have been looking at exaggeration, stylization in medieval work and here in this carving of a leopard there is a beautiful boldness to the masons work. What was informing this stylization ? Its hard to find out much, even the medieval artists i am looking at didn't work reflectively and keep a record of what they intended or why, they did not even consider themselves artists. Certainly keen copying is something that flows through all this work, from 600 bc to 1400 ad, no pressure to be original meant that progress could be made incrementally without ego. And this was evident in the work on display here in Corfu Town as it flows almost seamlessly across the centuries.
Detail of Leopard, note the stylistic concentric circles used to indicate the cats markings, wow.
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