Jan 28
mary magdalene on the cross with jesus, eric gill (20th centuary)
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mary magdalene on the cross with jesus, eric gill (20th centuary)
Eric Gill, Nude Girl With Hair, 1925
Eric Gill
woodcut
Wood Engraving Wednesday
Mary Groom
Yesterday, December 9, was the birthday of John Milton (1608-1674). To honor his memory (and to highlight the work of a woman wood engraver) we present these white-line wood engravings by British artist and printmaker Mary Elizabeth Groom (1903–1958) from the 1937 Golden Cockerel Press edition of Milton's Paradise Lost printed in an edition of 200 copies.
Of these engravings, Roderick Cave and Sarah Manson write in their A History of the Golden Cockerel Press, 1920-1960:
Groom had studied with Leon Underwood; and her subtle, magical style in her twenty-nine illustrations to the poem carries echoes of his technique. In addition, her own artistic reading of Milton was highly original, and far deeper than that of Gibbings [Robert Gibbings, a fellow wood engraver who had owned the Golden Cockerel Press until 1933]. . . . the text flawlessly printed at the Chiswick Press in the 18-pt Golden Cockerel [designed by Eric Gill, another fellow wood engraver] . . . . The book as published is indeed glorious.
View more of Mary Groom's wood engravings from this edition.
View more works from the Golden Cockerel Press.
View more posts with wood engravings!
I have a friend whose ex, a minor celebrity in some circles, was abusive.
Shortly after she and some other women went public about it, there were some people who chimed in talking about other misdeeds of his.
Her ex was, and is, a loathsome waste of oxygen, and the words, "...who deserves every accusation leveled at him" would almost escape my lips...
...Except that some of the accusations people began throwing around because they (understandably) hated this guy weren't true.
This did not help my friend at all! It muddied the waters, and gave her awful ex ammunition for his claims that people were just out to get him, and were willing to make stuff up to smear him.
Switching gears: there's been a lot of discussion recently about how some brilliant and influential art has been created by objectively terrible people. Part of that discussion has been calling out people who say, "Their work always sucked," or "I never liked it." Not only are statements like this unhelpful, they provide cover for predators. If you insist that your tastes reflect your morality, you're giving yourself a huge blind spot, and making it easy to dismiss evidence of harm done by creators you happen to like.
This is one reason why I think exhibits like this one are important: they help teach that lesson.
Eric Gill was one of the great British artists of the 20th century – and a sexual abuser of his own daughters. A new exhibition at Ditchling
Three notes on this: 1. by the time of that exhibition, Gill was long dead and therefore unable to profit from it.
2. This kind of thing isn't necessary for every artist, because not every creator does heinous things.
3. My friend's ex is nowhere near the artistic league of Eric Gill or any of the other creators I'll discuss.
Switching gears again...
If someone mentions a bespectacled British boy wizard with an owl familiar, in a modern setting with "secret world" magic, the name that springs to mind is most likely "Harry Potter", right?
But Timothy Hunter, from The Books of Magic, was published a full seven years before that. I was working in a bookstore when the novelizations for the BoM comics came out, and had to tell kids that no, this was not a HP rip-off.
I don't think the reverse was true, either: for one thing, The Books of Magic is set in the DC Universe, and I've never heard of JKR reading superhero comics. But also... sometimes completely separate creators will come up with strikingly similar ideas, utterly by coincidence. It's one reason why most authors tell fans NOT to send them ideas or fanfiction based on their work: there is rarely any good way to prove that you didn't steal a concept.
Now, obviously every creator is influenced by other people's works, and I completely agree that it's good to acknowledge that and to point fans towards your influences!
When Rowling began channeling her resources into making life worse for trans folk, I saw a lot of people saying, "Well, Harry Potter was just a mediocre rip-off of The Worst Witch anyway."
While I haven't read that series, I strongly doubt this claim. The idea of magic schools is older and more widespread than either of those series, and "British boarding school hijinks, but it's a magic school" was bound to be written more than once.
Now, some of you already know, and others have looked up, who originally wrote Tim Hunter. And... yeah, it's Neil Gaiman. *sigh*
In the last few days, I've seen some people saying, "The Sandman ripped off Tanith Lee's Tales from the Flat Earth." They cite a number of similarities: Azhrarn, the Lord of Darkness, is a pale-skinned, raven-haired Byronic figure with a sibling-like relationship to the Lord of Death and the Lord of Madness. Like the Endless, these beings are god-like, but specifically not gods. Apparently some people have mistaken fanart of Azhrarn for Morpheus. And Chuz, Prince Madness, has a bisected appearance, half his face horribly messed up, like the demoness Mazikeen.
But speaking as someone who was a fan of the late Tanith Lee years before I picked up an issue of The Sandman: I don't believe the latter was stolen from the former. Are there similarities? Yes, but they're superficial. If you've read both series, as I have, you'll know that the stories, settings, and characters are very different!
It's possible Gaiman was influenced by Lee's writing, and if so, I agree he should have acknowledged that. He did promote the work of other female creators, which is one reason why many of us thought he was "one of the good ones". But it's also entirely possible that these two authors independently came up with similar ideas.
When it comes right down to it, I think that statements like this -- "their best work was just a rip-off of something else" -- are just another variant of "their work always sucked".
It's often an easier accusation than "they've always been crap", because, as I said, writers come up with strikingly similar concepts all the time, and it's very hard to prove you didn't steal an idea. But it has the same problems, so -- barring the kind of case you could make with a college-level plagiarism-catching program -- I think it's best avoided.
Now, telling people, "Hey, are you sad about this creator turning out to be an awful person to whom you don't want to give any more money? Try this other person's work instead!" This is good! Let's have more of it!
Addendum 1: I think "separate the art from the artist" should mean, "you don't have to treat books already on your shelf as if they're suddenly coated in poison", not "I'm going to ignore this creator's actions and keep buying their products anyway."
Addendum 2: I just posted a version of this to Bluesky.
🧵 I have a friend whose ex, a minor celebrity in some circles, was abusive. Shortly after she and some other women went public about it, th
London, the 1920s. A man who carved letters into stone for a living - headstones, war memorials, inscriptions for churches - picks up a pencil and draws a woman's body with the same devotion he brought to an alphabet. Eric Gill was a contradiction that no art movement could fully contain. Trained as an architect's apprentice, radicalized by the Arts and Crafts movement, obsessed with the idea that art and craft were the same sacred act. By the time he drew "The Bath," he'd become one of Britain's foremost sculptors and typographers - the man who designed Gill Sans, who carved "Prospero and Ariel" on the BBC's headquarters. But his private drawings reveal someone working through the body with an almost liturgical intensity. No academic finish. No idealized Venus reclining on silk for a Paris Salon jury. Just graphite on cream paper, a figure leaning or half-seated, her left side carrying soft shading while the right thins into contour and bare page. A few strokes of red chalk along the edge where her hand meets a surface - deliberate, startling against all that grey. The face is turned away, left undetailed. The legs dissolve below the thigh. Gill believed leaving a work visibly unfinished was more honest than polishing it into illusion. That red chalk line at the lower left sits unexplained - a compositional anchor, a color note for a future version? The kind of studio trace that makes drawings feel more alive than finished paintings. Gill remains a deeply controversial figure, and rightly so. But the drawing stands on its own terms: the hand, the craft, the process laid bare. Quelle: meisterdrucke.com
Eric Gill
Tobias and Sara, 1926
Eric Gill, Os Amantes Divinos (1922)
