Peggy’s moustache

There are plenty of boys in Peggy’s class already, but for Romeo and Juliet she decided to be one more. Here she is playing Benvolio.

Below, more of the great cast of classmates. Thanks to Sandra Jacobs for the photos.

Artblogging: a gallery of libraries

BibliOdyssey: Beautiful old book illustrations, and then even more beautiful, even older, book illustrations, and then older and more beautiful still. This comes from a 16th Century manuscript of geometric perspective drawings.

50 Watts: Lots of great illustrations, mostly for books, and much in various styles of 20th Century modernism. The above image falls outside both these categories though, from a post on 19th Century Danish paper theatre designs. You might also like the posts on Danish children’s illustrator Egon Mathiesen, Japanese poster artist Tadanori Yokoo, and Mikhail Romadin’s children’s book Your Name? Robot.

Stopping Off Place: Lots of cool, even chilly, 20th Century book design, and then this, La Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval.

A Fuse #8 Production: On her School Library Journal blog, Elizabeth Bird of the New York Public Library has been running a poll of top 100 picture books, and another of top 100 children’s novels, some of which happily also have pictures.

Extra - added 7 July 2012:

Ptak Science Books: Eclectic antiquaria.

Curious Pages: Lane Smith and Bob’s blog of inappropriate children’s book recommendations has been dormant a while, but the archive is well worth revisiting.

Caustic Cover Critic: Pulling apart contemporary book jackets.

Kimberly Glyder Design: A portfolio of her book jackets for various US publishers, with occasional blogging about her design process at shelved books.

The Art Department: Blog of Irene Gallo, art director at science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor Books.

Excellent Kid’s books: Picture book reviews, including a very kind review of Sadie the Air Mail Pilot.

The Airship in Animal Land: A Flickr set labelled Children’s Books, but it’s mostly pages from this one pretty picture story.

Gogol blogging

December 5th

I spent the whole morning reading the papers. Strange things are happening in Spain. I read the throne has been left vacant and that the nobility are having a great deal of trouble choosing an heir, with the result that there’s a lot of civil commotion. This strikes me as very strange. They’re saying some ‘donna’ must succeed to the throne: that’s impossible. A king must inherit the throne. And they say there’s no king anyway. But there must be a king. There can’t be a government without one. There’s a king all right, but he’s hiding in some obscure place. He must be somewhere, but is forced to stay in hiding for family reasons, or perhaps because he’s in danger from some foreign country, such as France. Or there may be another explanation.

December 8th

I was about to go to the office but various reasons and considerations held me back. I couldn’t get that Spanish business out of my head. How could a woman inherit the throne? They wouldn’t allow it. Firstly, England wouldn’t stand for it. And what’s more, it would affect the whole of European policy: the Austrian Emporor, our Tsar, . . . I must confess, these events shook me up so much I couldn’t put my mind to anything all day. Mavra pointed out that I was very absent-minded during supper. And, in fact, in a fit of distraction I threw two plates on the floor, and they broke immediately. After dinner I walked along a street that led downhill. Discovered nothing very edifying. Afterwards I lay on my bed for a long time and pondered the Spanish question.

From Blog of a Diary of a Madman by Nikoláy Vasilévich Gógol, Penguin Classics edition, translation copyright © Ronald Wilks 1972.

We went to the theatre this week. Matthew Jure made a great madman at the Pleasance.

I love going to the theatre. As long as I’ve a kopeck in my pocket you can’t stop me. But these civil servants of ours are such ignorant pigs, you’d never catch those peasants going, even if you gave them a ticket for nothing.

Robin drawings

When searching my hard disk for reference images of birds a couple of weeks ago, I found some scans of Robin drawings. Not birds, but illustrations by Robin Jacques, taken from the book Drawing for Radio Times, by R.D. Usherwood, or perhaps The Artists of Radio Times by Martin Baker. A library book it was, and quite a few years ago.

Travellers on the London Tube may have seen some of Robin Jacques’s Sherlock Holmes drawings decorating the walls of Baker Street Underground Station.

I don’t know the dates on which these originally appeared in Radio Times magazine.

From what I remember, according to the book these were all done to quite short deadlines. I think it said all three of these detailed drawings for The Tempest were completed over a weekend.

I have seen a couple of his original drawings, and they are very small scale, with fine detail work to challenge a printer’s craft.

Click on the drawings to enlarge, or for extra high resolution scans click here: one, two, three, four, five, six.

Masks

But the one for comedy is missing . . .

The player and the audience

In the street in Córdoba, we saw an extraordinary looking man, a big man, a Black man, wearing cap, t-shirt, jeans, and a big billowing dusty flamenco dress. He was working the cars at the traffic lights, selling air fresheners I think. I saw a smartly dressed woman on a scooter give him a big smile and a greeting. But scooters don’t need air fresheners. As the bus moved on towards the railway station we saw another man doing the same routine at the next junction, also in a flamenco dress.

The night before in Córdoba we’d taken the kids to a flamenco show, past their bedtime, in a funny colourful place, first drink included in the price, a small audience of tourists already there, some of them also with children. The group on stage would do a wordless number, then a pause, come back with a singer and do a song, a pause, come back with a different singer, pause, come back with a dancer, and so on. One singer particularly gave it the whole arm, breaking heart, breaking voice, blood, sweat and tears. Then in the next pause he started working the tables. The patter about the flamenco group, no — the flamenco family. The price of the CD, the tape, the DVD. Signed by the whole group. Dedicated to the children. Of course we bought a CD. Resent it? I loved it. That's how it’s done. Tear your heart out for them and then get the money before they can look away.

Earlier in Ronda, we’d visited the bullring. The children played in the dust of the arena. The bullring museum included photos of one their most famous 20th Century bullfighters posing with various unnamed characters, recognisable amongst them Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles. Outside the bullring stood a man and horse, both in full costume, posing for photos with tourists for a fee.
From Ronda to Córdoba, from Córdoba to Madrid.

Coming out of the Madrid metro into Puerto del Sol on a sunny afternoon, we were disoriented and overwhelmed, and in the noisy crowded square a toreador, a woman dressed as Hello Kitty, and other costumed photo opportunities for sale. Also a mariachi band. Street sellers hawking sunglasses and twinkling knick-nacks. Everything here and now all pressing into the hot square between the tall, tatty, city buildings. Exhausted as we were, we fled, but it’s that part of the city I most want to revisit.

We were booked into a hostel on a street off the square, booked on the internet, in a hurry, last minute. There was a small doorway. A bell gave access to the dark narrow hallway lined with postboxes, leading to a small old lift. I can’t remember what floor reception was on. The fourth? Everything was brown. The one sign of the 21st Century was the coin-operated internet terminal. Our hearts sank. But now I can at least say there weren’t fleas in the beds, unlike the earlier hotel in Ronda which put on a much flashier front.

In our room, the noise rising from the street was as loud as if we were still down there. We could hear an incessant squeaking noise, lots of shouting and laughter. I did my best to ignore it, dizzy from lack of lunch. The children ran round the room, bouncing on beds, antic kittens, leaning over the balcony rail — a clown! It was a clown in the street, speaking in squeaks and mime. Our son got the phone to take a picture, over the railing, visions of it being dashed on the pavement several stories down. The clown was playing tricks on passers by, swapping his bag for theirs, hopping onto one for a piggyback ride, jumping into the street in front of a bus and refusing to let it pass. And finally throwing down his cap and gesturing for applause, then gesturing for money.

Though it didn’t end as simply as that — the business of harvesting payment was as big a performance as the rest. Once the crowd had put money in the hat he did a whole bit of business sitting on the pavement to count it, then looking up to count the crowd, then pursuing someone he suspected of not paying. And when the clown got a coin from this fellow he bit it of course, pulled a disgusted face and mimed shoving it up his bum. Then a woman came to give him more money. He smiled, she didn’t have to, he had so much already, but when she then walked off without giving it to him he pursued her, desperately making clear he really did want her money.

Below is a clip of Orson Welles, via Cartoon Brew, from some years after he was photographed at the bullring in Ronda, talking about performers and audiences, and why a television studio audience is not a real audience: because they haven’t payed. He maintains that the real audience is becoming extinct - an exaggeration, though it’s true that many performers now work without direct contact with their ultimate audience, and have a much less tangible relationship with them than the clown in Madrid or the Córdoba street seller. This has economic as well as cultural importance, as Mark Mayerson describes in a post from 2008, The Final Customer,  on the distant relationship between most commercial animators and their audience.

Oliver Messel

George Szirtes has posted an account in three parts (one, two, three,) of his visit to Whitehaven, where the Rosehill Theatre are celebrating their 50th anniversary with an exhibition of the work of theatre and film designer Oliver Messel.

The above designs by Oliver Messel were for the 1949 film of Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, reproduced in The Penguin Film Review no. 9 from the same year. Click for an enlargement. There are more Queen of Spades designs in this V&A Oliver Messel article.

Domino hippos

What was I thinking? I have no idea. One of a pile of designs for a stage production of Dr Dolittle in London, 1998. More here.

Beetles and Gershwin

Above: the perfect art of Harrison Cady, at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

For more six-legged larks may I recommend a visit to The Insect Circus.

Moving away from the insect theme, here is more musical theatre, this time from choreographer Pina Bausch who died on tuesday.

(Thanks S.)