Another quick post - this time looking at the wilderness (which for various cultural reasons always means "forest" to me) illustrations my Pauline Baynes, Arthur Rackham and Ian Miller.
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| Pauline Baynes | Bilbo's Last Song (poster) |
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| Pauline Baynes | Bilbos Last Poem (book) |
Pauline Baynes, is one of my favourite illustrators. Best known for several of Tolkiens books, notably
Farmer Giles of Ham
,
Smith of Wooton Major
and of course C.S. Lewis Narnia sequence. However, my favourite work of hers is
The Puffin Book of Nursery Rhymes. where she goes full spectrum from graphic pseudo medieval to delicate folksy. But here we see her trees...
The Last Song (poster) is an amazing piece of work, evoking the 'long straight road' between earth and faery - the journey to Neverland, a landscape and something far more allegorical. Each leaf it's own unique colour, and each tree alive with small woodland creatures. Baynes evokes an orderly, idealised nature, dancing on the edge of formalisation, but full of life and mystery.
It's impossible to think of trees without thinking of
Arthur Rackham, superb sense of antiquity in his drawings, the sepia mottled and textures coalescing into finely drawn stones, branches sinue-y dry cracked stretching and growing trunks, imp-haunted with their weird grinning faces.
Ian Miller is somewhat like Arthur Rackham, with knives in his blood. The raging madness and cruelty of nature seem to twist and break into many tentacled faces, clawed branches. I've always loved Ian Millers work, probably being first exposed to it by Games Workshop (White Dwarf covers and the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series
Phantoms of Fear
). Millers landscapes seems to evoke the medieval fear of the wood-land, the threat of wild animals, bandits and the terror of the wilderness, a sense of horror and disgust at the disorderly chaos (compared to the rational, orderly civilisation and enlightenment ideal) the landscape as Chaotic Evil.
is how used everything is. It's all old, slightly knackered looking, probably repaired, perhaps with a bit of moss or mould growing on it. The other thing is that there's a wealth of incidental detail - like the manticore on the skeletons chair, and the gawp-mouthed demon idol standing by the entrance. They look like clues for something, a secret guide to surviving the Walk - ah the manticore is on the left - so don't turn left here! There is also a sense that the rooms have been used for something else before, with strange little windows, odd cavities and grilles, weird faces carved into the walls bearing ominous expressions, beckoning you to reach into their gaping mouths to find a gem, or more likely a deadly flesh eating grub!
