Tag: pen and ink

Virgil Finlay

Artwork by Virgil Finlay

Born in July of 1914, Virgil Finlay was an American pulp science fiction, fantasy, and horror illustrator. Working in a range of materials from gouache to oils, he was most prominently known for his detailed pen and ink drawings using stippling, scratchboard, and cross-hatching techniques. In his thirty-five year career, Finlay created more than twenty-six hundred works of graphic art. 

Finlay was a childhood fan of science fiction, particularly the fantasy appearing in “Amazing Stories” and “Weird Tales” magazines in the late 1920s. He studied art in high school and was greatly influenced by the works of Pablo Picasso, Aubrey Beardsley, and Gustave Dore. At the age of twenty-one, Finlay submitted his art portfolio to editor Famsworth Wright of ”Weird Tales”, who debuted Finlay’s  work in the December 1935 issue.

Virgil Finlay’s work appeared inside sixty-two issues of “Weird Tales” and on nineteen covers. During this time, he also produced illustrations, both large and small, for “The American Weekly”, a Sunday newspaper supplement owned by the Hearst Corporation with over fifty million viewers, as well as several other pulp publications. 

During service in the US Army during World War II, Finlay saw combat in the Pacific Theater and produced posters and illustrations for the Morale Services of the war effort. After the war, he continued illustrating, turning to astrology magazines as the pulp magazine market declined, and started painting large abstract canvases.

In 1953 Virgil Finlay won one of the inaugural Hugo Awards for Best Illustrator. He had major surgery for cancer in early 1969, succumbing to a recurrence of the disease in January of 1971 at the age of fifty-six. Finlay was named Best Artist of 1945 in the fifty-year celebration of the Hugo Awards held in 1996.

“He came out of his coma. We left a sketch pad and pencils beside the bed. He did a drawing, went back into the coma, and died.”

—-Lail Finlay, Virgil Finlay’s daughter describing her father’s final hours

Edward Gorey

Illustrations by Edward Gorey

Edward St. John Gorey was an American writer and artist noted for his illustrated books. His characteristic pen-and-ink drawings often depict vaguely unsettling narrative scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings.

Gorey’s illustrated (and sometimes wordless) books, with their vaguely ominous air and ostensibly Victorian and Edwardian settings, have long had a cult following. Gorey became particularly well-known through his animated introduction to the PBS series Mystery! in 1980, as well as his designs for the 1977 Broadway production of Dracula, for which he won a Tony Award for Best Costume Design. He also was nominated for Best Scenic Design. In the introduction of each episode of Mystery!, Vincent Price would welcome viewers to “Gorey Mansion”.

In response to being called gothic, he stated, “If you’re doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there’d be no point. I’m trying to think if there’s sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children – oh, how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that’s true, there really isn’t. And there’s probably no happy nonsense, either.”

Notes: Among the February 2018 archive of this site, there is a Calendar article for February 22nd that contains a biography of short biography of Edward Gorey’s life.

For those Edward Gorey fans, which I admit to having been one since the time I could read, I highly recommend reading Acocella’s wonderful article about Gorey’s life and wit.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/edward-goreys-enigmatic-world

Pavel Tchelitchew

Pavel Tchelitchew, “The Rose Necklace”, 1931, Oil on Board, Signed in Latin and Dated ’31 t.l.’, 29 x 21 Inches, Collection of Seymour Stein

Pavel Tchelitchew was a Russian-born artist known for his Surrealist portraits and anatomical studies. Often camouflaging human bodies and faces into geometric lines or landscape forms, the artist used both abstraction and symbolism to convey both the outer and inner appearance of an object.

Born on September 21, 1898 in Moscow, Russia, Tchelitchew and his family were forced to flee Russia during the 1917 Revolution. Tchelitchew went on to study under Alexandra Exter at the Kiev Academy. After graduating from school, the artist worked designing and constructing stage sets for theaters in Odessa and later Berlin. Moving to Paris in 1923, he fell into the intellectual circles of Gertrude Stein, leading him to incorporate Cubist and Surrealist elements into his work.

Tchelitchew went on to form a small group of artists known as the Néo Humanists, which included André Lanskoy, Christian Bérard, and Eugene Berman. By the 1930s, his work had begun employing multiple perspectives, a brighter color palette, and extremely foreshortened figures.

While still working on stage designs for ballets by Igor Stravinsky, he began to receive international recognition, and in 1942 one of his most celebrated works, “Hide and Seek”, was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Tchelitchew died on July 31, 1957 in Grottaferrata, Italy. Today, Tchelitchew’s works can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“The Rose Necklace” is a portrait of Charles Levinson, known as ‘Le Vincent’, who was ‘a handsome ex-soldier with a superb necklace of tattooed flowers’ (Tchelitchew). With his nonchalant beauty and easy physicality, Levinson inspired Tchelitchew to produce a full series of tattooed circus figures. This portrait provides an earthy, sexual counterpoint to Picasso’s 1904  “Garçon à la Pipe” which inspired Tchelitchew to paint portraits of his partner Charles Henri Ford and others surrounded by flowers; only here the garland of roses is transposed to the sitter’s chest.