Meanwhile #169
This week’s visual digest to make your eyes and mind happy.
Came across Richard Dadd’s 1864 painting The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke thanks to this old Public Domain Review post popping up in my feed. Aside from the grisly story behind it this beautiful work – “It was painted for H.G. Haydon, an official at Bethlem Hospital, where Dadd was sent after he became insane and murdered his father in 1843” – its quite remarkable for being so small, a meagre 540 × 394 mm.
Also wonderful tiny, the woodland drawings of Hampshire-based artist Claire Leach caught my eye this week. The texture she builds up with a foam of lines is stunning, but it’s those areas of white bursting through the leaves that really strike me. Which reminds me of …
Nicole Rifkin’s cover for the first issue of Angie Hewitt’s Lone. Aside from Rifkin’s typically beautiful art (see also her cover for Folio Society’s new edition of Trainspotting), I’m immediately in love with anything that has that orangey-pinky-red that probably has a proper name but I have no idea what it is.
I’m only familiar with Jerry McMillan from his portrait of Ed Ruscha with six books on his head, but after this untitled collage from 1961 popped up on Pinterest (with no other context … is it even his?), I need to explore more of his work.
Shad Thames by Bill Brandt, 1938. Not much more to add, just … how incredible is this photograph? One of my favourite spots in London, although I haven’t been there much since the Design Museum moved out lord knows how many years ago.