Wednesday 27 January 2021

There Are So Many Periods In Art,

but only two that I really like,


Art Deco and Art Nouveau, and it was that latter style that these illustrations are taken from, François Schuiten’s Obscure Cities, the artist is Belgian, and he’s best known for his drawing in the series Les Cités Obscures, a collaboration with his childhood friend, Benoît Peeters, they first worked together at the age of 12 on a school magazine; Benoît wrote the fictional stories, Fançois made the imaginative drawings, and pretty soon the faculty tried to stop them from publishing it, preferring Latin translations and moralizing anecdotes as more appropriate subject matters, after losing sight of each other for a few years, they re-joined forced in the 1980s to create “Les Cités Obscures” (The Obscure Cities, or a more accurate French to English translation of the title is Cities of the Fantastic), and what fantastical illustrations they truly are,







they made ten albums in the graphic novel series there is a list at the end of this post, which invited us to a counter-Earth, a parallel world of their imaginations. “In this fictional world, humans live in independent city-states, each of which has developed a distinct civilization, each characterized by a distinctive architectural style”, as an aside if you ever have the chance to check out the Paris metro station Arts et Métiers, he designed it, for everything you need to know about The Obscure Cities, head over to Altaplana,

these are the original albums:

The Great Walls of Samaris

Fever in Urbica

The Tower

The Road to Armilia

Brüsel

The leaning Girl

The Shadow of a Man

The Invisible Frontier (Volumes 1 and 2)

The Theory of the Grain of Sand

Memories of the Eternal Present

You can catch up on all The Obscure Cities, available on Amazon, for myself what stunning art works.



No comments: