In the Labyrinth

Ursula Kirchner: Fairy Tale Paper Cuts

Ursula Kirchner -- like Lotte Reiniger Silhouette Films -- did amazing work in black and white detailed paper cut illustrations. These beauties are from Märchen, edited by Karlhans Frank, published by the Goethe-Institute in 1985. I love this style -- it's so dramatic, so filled with energy. I also think the way it's constructed from a single sheet of paper gives the visual equivalent of an organic and interconnected experience-- just like a story -- rather than a single illustration that only reveals one moment in the tale. In the large piece below one can follow the narrative in the panels while all the beautiful details, such as the borders of birds and leaves, knitted it together into a whole. Below is a Hansel and Gretel variant -- and I love the panel with the witch -- especially as the beauty of the paper cuts almost belies the horror of the story (children in cages in the backyard) and in the next panel, note how Gretel pushes the witch into the oven and she reappears as a hovering cloud.Great stuff.

(via 50Watts)

Pierre Ménager: A Portfolio of Six Block Prints of Old New Orleans Characters

The internet has been very good to me lately. I think it's an electronic version of Hades where in the ancient world the living, depressed and uncertain, could slip down to it's muddy banks to search for help among the shades of their ancestors. Just so it seems in a personally difficult year, I have received unexpected support from two of my beloved ancestors: the 1941 film of father's arrival as a teenager to America, and now this -- "Six Block Prints of Old New Orleans Characters," a portfolio of six (or seven if you count the cover) block prints produced by my grandfather Pierre Ménager. Through email (that electronic Hermes the messenger) I received notice of an impending sale of these lino-prints* of "Six Characters of Old New Orleans" by Pierre that the owner had purchased at an estate sale in Florida.

Falling From the Sky And The Art of Javier Pinon

I was quite astonished to see this wonderful mythic and western art of Javier Pinon -- the unusual combination of cowboys and Greek myths. This is a collage of Icarus Falling -- and it struck me so much because it bears an eerie resemblance to a passage of transformation that I wrote years ago in The Flight of Michael McBride. Falling from a cliff in the desert, the protagonist Michael McBride makes a last plea to Morrigu, the Irish Goddess of War, to save him. And his pleas are answered, thought not as he expected.

"His arms were pulled from the sockets, the elbows snapping as a force splayed the stretched limbs over the keening winds... [A]nd then from his flesh black shafts sprouted. Along his back, his belly, and his chest, he felt the stabbing birth of feathers pricking his skin. His arms lowered in the air, heavy with the draping weight, and he lifted them again, the air catching beneath the sail of black iridescent feathers."

Go have a look at more of Pinon's terrific art -- his Medusas are a wonderful mix of fashion magazine seduction and a glory of twisted snakes. Actually, Pinon's art really makes me miss the old Journal of Mythic Arts days -- how I would have loved to do a feature on him for an issue themed "Reinvention," on how the ancient has become remade in a new likeness.

Flannery O'Connor: Writing Habits

"Do you have any books the faculty doesn't particularly recommend?

Flannery O'Connor's commonsense advice on the practice of making writing a habit:

"I'm a full-time believer in writing habits, pedestrian as it all may sound. You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away. I see it happen all the time. Of course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that's all the energy I have, but I don't let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place. This doesn't mean I produce much out of the two hours. Sometimes I work for months and have to throw everything away, but I don't think any of that was time wasted. Something goes on that makes it easier when it does come well. And the fact is if you don't sit there every day, the day it would come well, you won't be sitting there."

Fernand Dumont: Treaties on Fairies

"6. After searching for entire nights without knowing it, beyond sleep, beyond exhaustion, having traveled forests of lucid insomnia, you will reach a great deserted clearing where, holding your breath, your ear against the ground, you can hear the very heartbeat of silence. Then, as you rise, you will realize that you are surrounded by fairies."

In 1940 Belgian Surrealist Fernand Dumont wrote "Treatise on Fairies" for his daughter -- a small pamphlet of 20 numbered sections on various aspects of Fairies--some quite quirky and others lovely like the section above. You can see more Dorthy Lathrop's illustrations here. 

**Art: Dorothy Lathrop, illus. for Down-Adown-Derry by de la Mare, 1922 

Mythic Moments: The Arrival of the SS Excambion at New York Harbor, January, 1941

Can you imagine the most mythical moment of your childhood? That moment when everything changes and you know that going forward you will be profoundly different, that your life as you once knew it would be over. My father Emile was born in Paris -- his father an American ex-patriot and his mother a beautiful young Jewish woman -- anxious to leave her working class origins behind her. They lived in a fashionable area of Paris, and my father and his sister Rosine studied ballet at the Paris Ballet Opera House. By the time he was a teenager, my father was on his way to becoming a principal dancer.

Then WWII happened and the Occupation of France in collaboration with the Vichy Government happened and my father's life as a dancer was shattered. They were Jews and so no longer welcomed at the Opera House. For the last six months of his life in Paris not one friend would speak them -- they would cross the street to avoid him for fear of his pariah status rubbing off on them. My father rose very early in the morning before curfew and slipped through streets unseen in order to be first in the bread lines.

My Grandfather had been out of the country on business when the Germans invaded and was unable to return to France. But he was able to provide the children with American passports through the embassy. My grandmother and the children traveled to Portugal where they were promised passage on a cargo ship, the SS Excambion that was carrying a number of dignitaries (Madame Curie's daughter on her way to try and convince the US to enter the war on behalf of the Jews, and Isaiah Berlin and his future wife) and many Jewish children traveling alone to relatives in the US.

The photo above is a still from a short film of the refugees arriving in NYC in January, 1941. Someone sent the link to the film to me knowing my father's history, and asked "See anyone you know?" In the opening shot two young teens turn to face the camera and there they are -- my father at about 15 and his sister about 14. Later in the film, there is a close up of the two of them leaning out to take in the sight of NYC and the Statue of Liberty.

This moment was very important to my father and he spoke of it often, included it in his poetry. So how amazing is it that some 70 years later and 21 years after his death this film surfaces, and I can see him again as a young man leaning into the sun, into his future. Yeah, you know I cried when I saw it.