I was looking around the internet for an illustration style to filter a photograph. I was specifically seeking an Arthur Rackham filter. Anybody who loves fairy paintings as much as I do has probably heard of Arthur Rackham. In searching for that, I came across this:
Pretty sexy huh? (Source)
Which is actually an image of a Kinuko Craft painting done in the Arthur Rackham style, from Playboy in the late 1970s. Yes, Playboy! Anyway, this illustration was done for something called “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti, which it turns out, is a poem I’ve never heard of. Below is an excerpt (it’s really long, y’all) and you can see the whole thing here.
Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpeck’d cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries;—
All ripe together
****
I’ve no reason to share this other than the fact I thought it was pretty neat. But it also illustrates how the internet can derail your focus! Even if a clear path is in front of me, I am stopping to look at all of the fruits and flowers along the way. Also, I once wrote to Kinuko Craft in the 1990s when the internet was a lot newer. I had found a copy of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” that she had illustrated and I was absolutely ENCHANTED by her work. An eager painter and artist, I wanted to tell her how much her work touched me. She wrote back. I wish I still had that computer with that hard drive with that email archive. That year I had emails from the plus size model Emme, and artists Amy Brown and Jessica Galbreth – both who were newly artists at the time. Also, that was back when ebay was new and reasonably priced, so it was easy to find good artists there that were selling their own work and weren’t some kind of import, mass-market artwork.
H.L. Brooks 