Contingent by Lukifer Aurelius
Equilibre (Balanced), 1946 by Suzanne Van Damme (1901-1986)
Eleven Heads, 1935 by Pavel Filonov (1883-1941)
My review of Jon McNaught’s newest book Kingdom is live now at The Comics Journal.
First two paragraphs:
Not much happens in Jon McNaught’s latest graphic novel Kingdom. A mother takes her son and daughter to Kingdom Fields Holiday Park, a vacation lodge on the British coast. There, they watch television, go to a run-down museum, play on the beach, walk the hills, and visit an old aunt. Then they go home. There is no climactic event, no terrible trial to endure. There is no crisis, no trauma. And yet it’s clear that the holiday in Kingdom Fields will remain forever with the children, embedded into their consciousness as a series of strange aesthetic impressions. Not much happens in Kingdom, but what does happen feels vital and real.
“Life, friends, is boring,” the poet John Berryman wrote in his fourteenth Dream Song, before quickly appending, “We must not say so / After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns.” In Kingdom, McNaught creates a world of flashing sky and yearning sea, natural splendor populated by birds and bats, mice and moths. In Kingdom Fields, waves crash in gorgeous dark blues, the sun rises in golden pinks, rain teems down in violet swirls, and the wind breezes through meadows of grass. It’s all very gorgeous, and the trio of main characters spend quite a bit of the novel ignoring it. The narrator of John Berryman’s fourteenth Dream Song understood the transcendental promise of nature’s majesty, yet also understood that “the mountain or sea or sky” alone are not enough for humans—that we are of nature and yet apart from it.
Read the rest at the Comics Journal.
Boy in Profile, 1645 by Wenceslaus Hollar (1607–1677)
Two Telegrams (Antonioni), 2013 by Jen Mazza (b. 1972)
Under the orders of the Great Master, they’re embroidering the earth’s mantle, seas, mountains, and living things. Only the girl has woven a ruse in which she is seen beside her beloved.
Remedios Varo’s description of her painting The Embroidering of the Earth’s Mantle (1961). From the collection Letters, Dreams & Other Writings. Translated by Margaret Carson. From Wakefield Press.
Figure with Horn, 2017 by Derek Fordjour (b. 1974)
The Split, 1992 by Alexander Boghossian (1937-2003)
An Arm for an Eye, 2017 by Elizabeth Glaessner (b. 1984)
Via–
Glory of Spring (Radiant Spring), 1950 by Charles Burchfield (1893-1967)
The Spring Witch, c. 1880 by George Wilson (1848-1890)
The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the Water, 1937 by J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973).
From The Morgan Library & Museum’s exhibition “Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth.”
White Cat, 1938 by Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–1977)
Biblioklept 