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Stanley Donwood (artwork)


Lacatus

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13 hours ago, Lacatus said:

Ecco, come promesso, alla cortese attenzione degli scatters (anche quelli che non usano instagram), un volumetto con copertina marmorizzata datato 1827, direttamente dalla biblioteca di mio bisnonno:

 https://www.instagram.com/p/BSqZwPBh7Q6/?taken-by=nigolaup

gli hashtag #mariomonti #tragedie sono ironici: il tragediografo è Vincenzo Monti, non Mario :baguette:

 

Che cimelio Laca, bello!!! 

C'ho messo un pochino a ritrovarlo, praticamente questa:o:

ytgpr8jk35.jpg

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3 minutes ago, frasky said:

Ho trovato questo blog che raccoglie buona parte del materiale del DAS, in particolare gli artwork di Stanley durante l'era In Rainbows

http://hodiaudirekton.blogspot.it/2007/05/

Mi spiegate che vuol dire "Hodiau Direkton"?

Ti ricordi quello che ti ho scritto da poco su instagram...che nell'attesa dell'Lp7 ci han fatto diventare tutti matti? Ecco... :)

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  • 2 weeks later...

So. It’s the second day of working on a project called Optical Glade at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht. The weather is cold and there is snow coming from the north – I’ve just been up on the walkway at the top of the cupola, pictured above. But we are inside, using what I can only describe as Mediaeval techniques to transfer an immense drawing on to the eight walls inside the dome. These techniques include making millions of tiny holes in the paper stencil, dusting them with blue chalk and then connecting the dots with a pencil. At the moment we are doing the ‘easy’ part, but soon we will begin on the ‘difficult’ part, where the walls curve up to the apex. Easy and difficult are relative terms. It would be properly easy just to go to a café and not do this at all. But well, you know.

The aim is to create a sort of contemplative pagan space, surrounded by upturned trees stylised into optical confusion, but at the moment it’s more like being within a building site wreathed in blue chalk dust. There are five floors of scaffolding, clattery metal staircases and vertiginous walkways. I’m trying to make some kind of sanctuary but at this time it’s anything but.

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7 minutes ago, frasky said:

The aim is to create a sort of contemplative pagan space, surrounded by upturned trees stylised into optical confusion, but at the moment it’s more like being within a building site wreathed in blue chalk dust. There are five floors of scaffolding, clattery metal staircases and vertiginous walkways. I’m trying to make some kind of sanctuary but at this time it’s anything but.

Mi piace moltissimo! :pollice: Curiosissimo!

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Hello again. This is a surprise, isn’t it? Me writing in my stupid blog again so soon, I mean, rather than a totally ignorant authoritarian real-estate and reality-television person being in charge of nuclear weapons. Let’s not think about him for as long as we can, hey? Which is about one minute. But never mind. here I am again, talking to you via the internet for ONE MINUTE ONLY. If you read really fast.

Where was I? Ah yes. Today I’ve not done any more work in the Sacred Dome of the Bonnefanten because it was King’s Day here in the Netherlands and they take their holidays seriously over here, as indeed we all should. So instead I’ve been doing other stuff and also lazing around a lot. One thing that has come to light during my idle hours has been the artwork for this year’s Glastonbury Festival of Performing Arts and Muntering Around which looks like this:

It’s called Hold Your Cool and it began life a fiendishly complicated linocut. Actually it began life as a vague idea and then became a scrawled sketch and then became a linocut, but it’s subsequently become a lino print done on a Vandercook proofing press at the workshop of the esteemed Richard Lawrence, then a digital photograph taken by the equally esteemed Peter Stone, then a colourful thing made by the total chancer Stanley Donwood i.e., me, and now it’s out in the screen world courtesy of @glastofest and so on. It is a long and strange and arguably arduous journey from idea to reality, so thank you to everyone that has helped me to do this. I really appreciate it.

Hold Your Cool is the title and it’s probably not too self-indulgent to use the internet to explain why. I spend a lot of time on trains because I can’t drive. And often I pass through Swindon, usually without stopping or getting off. This is not to denigrate Swindon. I know nothing about the place aside from the fact that it has a bus station situated underneath a multi-storey car-park that smells strongly of human urine and is frequented by characters unlikely to pass muster in a swanky restaurant. The rest of Swindon is probably great.

Anyway, the reason why I think Swindon is probably great is that, until quite recently, on the side of some huge and boring metal-clad warehouses along some railway sidings were the words HOLD YOUR COOL sprayed in letters about ten feet high. Every time I passed them I felt better. They were even spaced really well, like H O L D  Y O U R  C O O L.

It was like an instruction; whatever happens, whatever anyone says to you, however badly your work goes, however awfully your partner responds to your attempts to heal a rift, however frightening the newspaper headlines are, whatever your boss says to you, that idiot on the tube, anyone who takes you for a fool, all the people that treat you like shit. The feeling of inadequacy that’s the result of watching the news.  The feeling of guilt. The horror. The terror.

H   O   L   D    Y   O   U   R    C   O   O   L

Some fucking halfwit thought that this public service announcement was ‘graffiti’ so they covered it up. It’s my duty to the anonymous ‘perpetrator’ of the aforementioned ‘graffiti’ to take these heartfelt and beautiful words and spread them as widely as I can. Anyway, I’ll shut up now. Bye.

 
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jeroen2.gif

 

As you can see, it’s climbing up the walls like a kind of geometric invasive weed. Except its not really very geometric as it’s all hand-drawn. As I mentioned earlier on (on the first day, I think) we used a technique from the Middle Ages to transfer the design to the white-painted walls, using chalk dust and pencils. Once all the pencil lines were drawn it was time to realise that the cupola is not a geometric shape as I had foolishly assumed whilst working on the 3D model back in London with ben_k, but instead is a creation composed of eight individually different panels.

Anyway, as soon as we started painting with the black paint things started to be more enjoyable than clambering up and down five stages of scaffolding in a cloud of blue dust, because now we could see what was emerging. In one week we have painted from the floor to the very apex of the dome. And in a few more days we will have finished with the black paint and will move on to the white paint. Then back to black paint to tidy it up. And then the scaffolding will be removed and the audio part of the work will be installed. More on that in the future.

The painting itself – the design of it, I mean – represents a sacred space, in the form of a ring of upturned trees. I will tell you some of the reasons why this happened. When I was a small boy there was a derelict cottage at a crossroads near where I lived. I found its ruinous and decaying nature very alluring and I investigated the cottage as often as I could. It was certainly older than most of the structures that stood nearby; a relic of a time before motor cars, tarmac, DIY stores and traffic lights. On the side of the cottage wall was a small weathered stone plaque with writing carved into it that said that the spot marked where the Peddars Way had crossed. The Peddars Way, I later found out, is (or was) a very strange and very straight track or path that crosses the part of England known as East Anglia. No-one knows where it starts, and it runs for hundreds of miles before going straight into the sea on the coastline of north Norfolk. It doesn’t connect towns, would have been of no use militarily, and couldn’t have been a trade route as it went, quite literally, nowhere. It is (or was) also reputed to be haunted by the Black Shuck, a terrible dog the size of a Great Dane that had one Cyclopean eye and meant certain death to anyone who caught sight of it.

In 1998 the destination of the Peddars Way was uncovered. A storm surge stripped away layers of mud and peat from the coastline and revealed what’s become known as Sea Henge, a circular construction made of huge wooden poles surrounding an immense upturned tree. It had lain, preserved, under a thick layer of mud for thousands of years, and for thousands of years the Peddars Way had continued to point to it. Of course, I’ve no idea what would compel people to undertake a hazardous journey for hundreds of miles through what would have been dense woodland along an eerily straight path to reach this strange structure. But they did, and probably for much, much longer than our current civilisation has existed.

So here in Maastricht, I’m painting my own version of a henge, or a grove. The trunks of the trees emerge from the octagonal window at the apex of the cupola, and surge down the curved dome walls, plotting out into branches and twigs that brush the floor. The trunks of the tree forms twist around the walls; the limbs of the trees have become formal annotations of actual branches – I’ve more-or-less obeyed natural laws of growth and structure, but with the aim of creating a moonlight shadow-cage. A monochrome haven in the noise and haste of 21st century Maastricht. Next to the river.

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