I’m almost done preparing the illustrated ebook version of “The Fall of the House of Usher”. Hopefully will be finished in the next few days. Here’s the “end” card.
Category: art
Geometric Blackletter Typeface
I wanted to create a title card for the ebook “The Fall of the House of Usher” that I am illustrating. All the pictures are geometric and so the type should be as well. I came across Blackletter script as I was investigating gothic typefaces, and actually it’s a pretty good type very close to the clean and regular lines contemporary geometric types.
Here is the title card for the book with a custom geometric version of blackletter type.
Poe(rtrait)
I am working on a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe for an illustrated short story of him. I thought it would be appropriate to end the book with his picture and one of his quotes.
Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
Some of my favorite quotes focus on the fuzzy boundaries between life and dead, sanity and madness, reality and dream.
Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.
And my favorite so far,
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
Maruja Mallo and the Quest for Mathematical Harmony
I learnt my love for conceptual art and iconography from Maruja Mallo (also my love for opera but that’s another story.) Maruja was the 4th unrecognized member of the “Student Residence” with Dali, Lorca and Buñuel in the Madrid of the ’20s. She camouflaged herself among the Surrealists, but she was really figurative, geometric and always very precise in her art.
Early in her career Maruja painted the working man and woman, transforming what she saw through lens of geometry and elevating this reality to iconographic status.
In her Tratados Armonicos (literally “Harmonic Treatises”) Maruja expresses her love and search for order, harmony and symmetry.
In her own words:
Nature is what began to attract me, to discover a new order. Order is the intimate architecture of nature and man, the living mathematics of the skeleton.
In nature—clairvoyant and mysterious, spontaneous and structured, devoid of anachronistic ghosts—I analyze the structure of minerals and vegetables, the diversity of crystalline and biological forms synthesized in numerical and geometric patterns, in a living and universal order…
While in the exile in South America she continued this quest for mathematical harmony as it can be observed in her series of heads.
Maruja Mallos’ talent was recognized very late in life, particularly by the younger generations who welcomed her back in Spain during the transition to democracy after Francisco Franco’s death in 1975.
Life in this planet is Art, Science or War.
—Maruja Mallo
Maruja in Spanish:
La naturaleza es lo que empieza a atraerme, hallar un nuevo orden. El orden es la arquitectura intima de la naturaleza y del hombre, la matemática viviente del esqueleto.En la naturaleza clarividente y misteriosa, espontánea y construida, desprovista de fantasmas anacrónicos, analizo la estructura de los minerales y vegetales, la diversidad de formas cristalinas y biológicas sintetizadas en un orden numérico y geométrico, en un orden viviente y universal…
La vida de este planeta es Arte, Ciencia o guerra.
Profile of man #3
