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Undead, Undead: John Coulthart’s beautiful illustrations for Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’
09.04.2018
08:50 am
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We all know what Dracula looks like. Bela Lugosi and innumerable Hammer horror movies starring Christopher Lee have fixed the Count in our imagination. He’s tall, gaunt, interestingly pale, with slicked back hair, and a set of unfeasibly large canine teeth. He sports a cloak, and what appears to be an evening suit which can often make him look like a nightclub doorman or a shifty croupier at a Mayfair casino dealing from the bottom of the pack. When commissioned to provide the illustrations for a new edition of Bram Stoker’s enduring tale, artist John Coulthart decided to keep his work faithful to the source material.

Coulthart had previously been commissioned by the same publisher to illustrate Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with which he had similarly “opted for fidelity to the text and period details “:

Despite its epistolary form, Dracula is much more readable (in a contemporary sense) than Frankenstein, so more people will have read Stoker than Shelley; but the sheer scale of cultural mauling that Dracula has been subject to means that—as with Frankenstein—even the allegedly faithful adaptations often deviate from the novel. The lounge-lizard vampire that everyone knows was a creation of Hamilton Deane’s 1924 stage adaptation, the success of which led to Tod Browning’s film and Bela Lugosi’s performance (which I’ve never liked); film and theatre may have made Dracula universally popular but the Lugosi stereotype has overshadowed the more powerful and violent character that Stoker gives us, with his bearded face, hairy palms and glowing eyes. So that’s who you see here, although the restrictions of time and brief (one picture per chapter) meant that some of the moments I’d have liked to illustrate had to be forfeit. Poor old Renfield gets short shrift, and some of the minor male characters are out of the picture altogether.

Regardless of the constrictions of time and remit, Coulthart’s illustrations for Dracula are among the very best ever produced, as his detailed work fully captures the intense, eerie, menacing, and almost dreamlike atmosphere of Stoker’s novel where you can “believe in things that you cannot.”

See the complete set of John Coulthart’s marvellous illustration fro Dracula here.
 
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See more of John Coulthart’s superb illustrations for ‘Dracula,’ after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.04.2018
08:50 am
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‘Nightmares’: The perfect calendar for 2017
11.22.2016
09:40 am
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If you think 2016 has been a bad year then be prepared for what may come in 2017 with John Coulthart’s magnificent Nightmares calendar.

Following on from his highly successful Lovecraft calendar last year, artist, writer and all round good guy Coulthart has pulled together a rich selection of his finest artwork to create an eye-catching calendar for 2017. His theme this time round is nightmares—which may be apt considering some of this year’s startling events.

Coulthart has picked some of his best known (and some little known) artwork from the mid-1990s—including paintings of Lord Horror, the Burroughs influenced Red Night Rites diptych and “one of the pages from [his] Kabbalistic collaboration with Alan Moore, The Great Old Ones.”

I like Coulthart’s work—it unsettles those dark corners where imagination grows wild—and think his Nightmares 2017 will look damned good on any wall. Order yours here.
 
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January: ‘Steps of Descent ‘(digital, 2008).
 
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February: ‘Untitled’ (acrylics on board, 1997).
 
Take a peek at what the rest of 2017 has in store for you on John Coulthart’s ‘Nightmares’ calendar, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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11.22.2016
09:40 am
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Cthulhu fhtagn: 2016’s ‘Lovecraftiana Calendar’ makes an eldritch Christmas gift
11.25.2015
10:03 am
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Are you a fan of H. P. Lovecraft? Or, maybe just seeking that perfect something for the Lovecraftian in your life? Then look no further than John Coulthart’s Lovecraftiana Calendar for 2016, which contains twelve sumptuous illustrations of some of Lovecraft’s best known creations.

Coulthart is an artist, designer, writer and curator of the website {feuilleton}—an essential compendium of his interests, obsessions, and passing enthusiasms. Coulthart earliest artwork was for the album Church of Hawkwind in 1982. Since then, he has created a splendid oeuvre of artwork for books, magazines, comics and albums—for the likes of Steven Severin, Cradle of Filth, Melechesh and many, many others. Coulthart illustrated the “definitive” edition of Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark and Other Grotesque Visions, and was involved in creating the legendary and infamous comic Lord Horror published by Savoy Books. He also has the “dubious accolade of having an earlier Savoy title, Hard Core Horror #5, declared obscene in a British court of law.”

With the Lovecraftiana Calendar, Coulthart has brought together a selection of his mixed media illustrations of such mythical figures as Hastur,  Night Gaunt, Shoggoth, and locations such as the lost city of R’lyeh to powerful effect. And if this product twists your melon, then you can order your calendar here.
 
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JANUARY: Necronomicon (digital, 2015)

 
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FEBRUARY: The Yellow King (acrylics on board, 1996)

 
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MARCH: Nyarlathotep II (digital, 2009)

 
More ‘Lovecraftiana’ after of the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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11.25.2015
10:03 am
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John Coulthart on the Art of Jim Leon
03.15.2010
04:00 pm
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Here’s an awesome find from artist John Coulthart (who I relink quite a bit because his blog is, in my opinion, one of the great sources of interesting original content on the web. He finds the kind of stuff that you would prolapse even if you saw in a bizarro, dusty boutique used book store, you know, those things we had before the Interwebs that don’t exist anymore. His blog is kind of like finding a first edition of the Necronomicon 3-4 times a week.)

Here he writes about Jim Leon, who drew bizarre psychosexual wonderlands for Oz magazine in the 60s:

This, dear friends, is what the art of the fantastic could give us but rarely does, something which combines the metaphysical intensity of the Symbolists with a post-Freudian sensibility to create what Philip José Farmer once called “the pornography of the weird”. Jim Leon was a British artist whose work gained prominence via the underground magazines of the 1960s, especially Oz, although he was never really a psychedelic artist as such. Many of his earliest paintings show the influence of the Pop artists, it was only later in the decade that a distinctly original and surreal imagination came to the fore. Oz was always pretty scurrilous and had no qualms about challenging the authorities with bizarre sexual imagery which other magazines would never dare to print. Leon and other artists were fortunate to have such a public forum for outré work, a few years earlier or later and they might not have found an outlet at all.

(Behold this utter glory here.)

(John Coulthart: The Haunter of the Dark: And Other Grotesque Visions)

Posted by Jason Louv
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03.15.2010
04:00 pm
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Storm de Hirsch: Peyote Queen
12.05.2009
03:46 pm
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Infamous psychedelic Lovecraftian artist John Coulthart reports on a 1965 classic dug up via UbuWeb?

Posted by Jason Louv
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12.05.2009
03:46 pm
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Alexis Rockman: Drowned Worlds
11.11.2009
04:03 pm
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Weird illustrator John Coulthart reports on the Ballardian, dead-America landscapes of http://www.alexisrockman.net/. Of course you can put “Ballardian” before anything and I’ll look at it, but this is particularly good stuff.

Alexis Rockman?

Posted by Jason Louv
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11.11.2009
04:03 pm
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