Haunted House

Late last night I was flipping through the August 1983 issue of Computer & Video Games magazine, a British video game enthusiast publication, and came across this great illustration for the game Haunted House. Apparently the magazine was initially aimed more at coders than your casual arcade enthusiast, as most game spotlight articles feature pictures of long blocks of code rather than any in depth look at the games themselves.

The illustration is signed Gulbis. I have no idea if this is some early work by the self-proclaimed "Football Artist" Stephen Gulbis, or not. When you Google his name a lot of early home console video game packaging comes up, none of it explicitly linked to that same Steve Gulbis. Gulbis is British, and though he touts having built a career on solely drawing soccer players and American football players for various markets, I have to imagine he'd had to diversify somewhat at some point. You wouldn't know it to look at his website, though. 

The subject matter, obviously, made the piece stick out for me, but ghosts and skeletons aside, I really like the limited cool color palette with the high contrast of the black shadows. I also really like the Dutch angle perspective, it really adds a sense of high drama to the image that a straight-on version of the image would lack. 

Eye On Art: Dominick Di Meo

 I first came to know about Dominick Di Meo in 2019, when I visited the Minneapolis Institute of Art's showing of work by artists associated with the Hairy Who collective from Chicago. You can see pictures from that visit here. I don't believe that Di Meo was part of the Hairy Whos, at least not formally, but rather was living in Chicago around the same time, making him more of an accomplice-in-art than a group participant. 

Whatever the case may be, when I first saw his piece Untitled (Red line with heads) (above) it smacked me square in the attention zone and held it for quite a while. The juxtaposition of the mask-like, almost skeletal faces floating around the amorphous background, and the red hot laser beam of color shooting across the otherwise gloomy canvas seemed so intriguing in the presence of all of the pop colors and very precisely dictated forms of all of the other pieces on display. 

Even if Di Meo's aim isn't to necessarily produce something aesthetically ghoulish or sinister, there's definitely a haunting, otherworldly vibe to it. Maybe it has something to do with all of those ghostly  not-quite-skulls silently moaning in three dimensions from his canvases and sculptural pieces. Of course if you do even a cursory web search on the artist, you'll be told first and foremost, repeatedly, as if it's the only thing anyone has to say about the guy, that he spent a fair amount of time during his formative years in a polio ward, which is credited as the source of his darkly askew output. 

Another common visual in his work is the collage of common household objects, usually presented in a jumble, and rarely as true representations of those items but rather as hazy absences of them; almost as if someone took an x-ray of a junk drawer and transferred the negative image to canvas.  You can see what I mean with the assemblage of scissors, bits of string and other household junk floating within the menacing amoebic form in the 1973 piece Untitled (face on yellow) below (from the Corbett vs. Dempsey website here). Are these the commingled specters of the items we consider garbage but refuse to wholly part with, confronting the viewer to let them know that they may have been confined to a darkened drawer somewhere, but that they do in fact still exist and can still serve a purpose (for if they couldn't, would they have been kept around in the first place)? Is that somehow related to the artist's interment in a polio ward as a child? No idea.

Whatever it is that drives Dominick Di Meo to produce the art that he does, I am a definite fan of the output. He eventually found his way back to New York where he continues to live and make art. Collected below are some more of my favorite Dominick Di Meo pieces.

"The Soft Torso Breathes" 1964; synthetics on canvas.

 

"Invalid With Mirror" 1973; synthetic polymer transfer on canvas.

"Untitled" c. 1970; acrylic, polymer, shaped elements, and tacks
on three canvases.

"Harlequinade" c. 1965; oil on canvas. 

Haunted Hot Rods

I was, and still am, I guess, a monster kid. I think I have shared before the story about how one fateful afternoon in the 1980s I was exposed to Tod Browning's Dracula, and my mind was suitably blown and primed to seek out monster movies, and related ephemera, from that point forward. Of course to present that as the moment I was introduced to monsters in the pop cultural sense, would be inaccurate, because I had by that point, already been toddling around in Incredible Hulk t-shirts since I was in diapers, and had had a shoe box full of Masters Of The Universe figures–a large number of which were monsters of various sorts. 

As I grew older, and my interests diversified, monsters (more so than straight "horror") stuck with me. And as I got into comic books, and later music and other things, I found these amazing overlaps in the spheres of the Venn Diagram of my hobbies. There's surf music about monsters?! There are comic books with monster stories?! I quickly grew to favor supernatural comic book characters like Deadman, Ghost Rider, Werewolf By Night and Swamp Thing, and scoured the weekly TV Guide for listings of monster and sci-fi movies on AMC (back when they were more akin to what TCM is now, than a version of early 90s HBO). Fortunately the late 80s/early 90s burgeoning basic cable market was flush with shows like Werewolf, Forever Knight and Monsters, and the Universal Monsters were back in vogue, popping up in everything from toys to Doritos packaging.  

As I pursued these various interests I found that the offerings to discover were often unilaterally declining in quality the more recently they were produced. Straight-to-video horror might have a certain outsider charm to it, but something like Galaxy of Terror or Creature didn't seem to hold a candle to Creature From The Black Lagoon or The Mad Ghoul. I don't like gore if it's the focal point of a movie/comic/novel, I don't enjoy films about groups of people, often teenagers or thirty-somethings playing teenagers, being systematically butchered in novel ways by some psychopath in a mask. I also don't have time for parodic material that doesn't respect the source. Was I whole-heartedly obsessed with The Misfits when they crossed my path? You bet! But metal that glorifies senseless brutality, not so much. 

Yadda yadda yadda. My brand of horror has always been more Hammer Films, Boris Karloff, EC Comics and Famous Monsters of Filmland than Fangoria, Rob Zombie and the hyper graphic Twisted Tales. That isn't to say there isn't a great deal of contemporary horror stuff that I greatly enjoy, but prior to the 1970s the idea seemed to be providing entertainment, not entrails. I like a bit of fun with my fear and there's lots of great stuff buried in the past if you dig for it. I've dug out a 1964 issue of Pete Millar's Drag Cartoons magazine to share today. It's a quick little hot rod monster mash produced by noted animation designer and cartoonist Alex Toth. Page 3 is a little faded but still reads just fine. Note the resemblance of the Monster in this strip to Dick Briefer's design for the creature in his Frankenstein comics (pictured below).

Cartoonist Dick Briefer had two different creature 
designs for two different iterations of his Frankenstein comics,
one humorous and cartoony, one menacing for straight horror
stories. The above is a panel from a horror-oriented 1954 issue.

 I'm not a gearhead by any measure; both of my grandfathers were career body men for various dealerships, my appreciation, however, is more or less confined to the aesthetic appeal of vintage car body design and the George Barris TV car creations, hence why I have the source material for this here post.

Enjoy.

Eye On Art: Alexander Archipenko

 He was born in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1887, but his pursuit of art took him to Moscow, Paris, and eventually New York, where he was interred in Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx, when he passed in 1964. Archipenko is credited as having been the first to apply Cubist principles to architecture and the creator of "sculpto-paintings", which are pieces that combine 2-D painted art with 3-D sculptural components on a canvas. 

"Médrano II" 1913-14. Painted tin,
wood, glass and painted oil cloth.

My introduction to Archipenko was entirely incidental. I had biked over to my local library and was looking at a book on Cubism, hoping to find some spark of inspiration that might ignite the pilot light of my imagination and result in a sketchbookin' session. I don't recall the exact title of the book, or its author–not that it's entirely important here–but on a page amongst some quarter-page reproductions of Fernand Léger's and a couple of Braques, was this tiny black and white picture of an Archipenko sculpture. It was this tiny, Post-It note-sized reproduction of Médrano II (1913). It stuck out like a neon sign. As much as I adore Léger's cartoonish pop color compositions, and Braque's broken-mirror-reflection building scapes, this tiny little insert photo was able to draw my eye away from the featured stars and put a bug of determination in my brain that buzzed to know more about this artist and his work.

"Femme assise" 1920. Gouache on paper.

"Femme Marchante" 1912. Sculpture in bronze.

There's a certain dynamism in Archipenko's pieces that vibrates with an aesthetic resonance in tune with those to whom Mid-Century abstraction appeals. Archipenko's work not only encapsulates everything that I find appealing about Cubism, both in form and principle, but also, as stationary, inanimate objects, his sculptures seem to resonate with a frenetic energy that other Cubist sculptors like Joseph Csaky and Jacques Lipchitz don't. I'm not disparaging either of those artists, Lipchitz's series of angular figures Le Guitariste (1918), Pierrot (1919), Harlequin With Clarinet (1919-20) and Man With Guitar (1920) would be tempting purchases if money were not an issue; but speaking subjectively, it's the negative space that Archipenko incorporates into his forms that create a sense of movement. He commented on this practice by saying:

"Traditionally there was a belief that sculpture begins where material touches space. Thus space was understood as a kind of frame around the mass... Ignoring this tradition, I experimented using the reverse idea, and concluded that sculpture may begin where space is encircled by the material." 

"In The Boudoir" 1915. Oil, graphite, photograph,
metal and wood on panel.

"Der Tanz" 1912. Sculpture in plaster.

"Carrousel Pierrot" 1913. Painted plaster.

"Venus" 1954.

"Red" 1957.

"Torso In Space" 1952-53. Lithograph, screenprint and embossing on paper.

Obviously this is just a taste of Archipenko's prolific output. Some of the pictures above were gleaned from Archipenko.org, which is an amazing resource that breaks down his life by decade and allows one to really see how his process changes, how his work progresses. It's definitely recommended to dip your toe into, even if you just want more eye candy.