constant escape

winter withered, warm

Courage is the criterion of belief. To back one horse and fancy another means willing one thing and believing another. Magic (faith) is simply a means of unifying Desire and Belief. The sub- conscious mind is employed to create your belief and unite it to a real desire. The cards will not confirm what is already knownI Believe in the cards. For the only requirements are a real desire to win, and a mind free of preconceived ideas. Accept the system suggested by the use of the cards. A superficial attitude or insincerity is a definite bias.

And from a section called "Mind to Mind and How", this section was touches upon what I was referring to earlier:

Consistent with other directions of abstract knowledge, the threshold of the occult is the market-place for the charlatan. Coinage 15 sometimes different - lies have a strange longevity and fecundity - truth becomes buried. Abstracts such as 'mind', 'thought', 'intellect' naturally have no exact definitions - to agree at all, we have had to resort to the Classics. Should I, as a God, fall into this cesspit of inexactitude? I too revert and rely on 'Delphic' me ans fo r my answers - there are as yet no final conclusions. But I assert that the most positive and exact evidence it is possible to repeat to others reposes in that lowest, most common denominator of occultism - 'fortune-telling', Be patient awhi le for you will be enlightened by what follows .

The means used and the way it happens are simple, the inverse of scientific. I use a traditional formula, created by instinctive guess and arbitrarily formed, not evolved by hypothesis and experiment. The law of sorcery is its own law, using sympathetic symbols. This logomachy was subsequently deduced from actual practice, using cards like an 'oracle', with the exponent as interpreter.

A slap in the face, that first sentence, reminding me how easy it is to become charlatan out of having a bad faith in one's own nature. The answer? A constant maintenance. A waxing and waning spiritual clarity, rather than a securely final plateau.

edit: an answer to what question? This one: how does one avoid mistaking a bad faith for good one? By means of some eternal audit?
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
2017_CSK_13297_0061_000(austin_osman_spare_flower_girl).jpg

image
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen



And from a section called "Mind to Mind and How", this section was touches upon what I was referring to earlier:



A slap in the face, that first sentence, reminding me how easy it is to become charlatan out of having a bad faith in one's own nature. The answer? A constant maintenance. A waxing and waning spiritual clarity, rather than a securely final plateau.

edit: an answer to what question? This one: how does one avoid mistaking a bad faith for good one? By means of some eternal audit?
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Thats cool about Beery. There was a dropping of his name in Mank, but I forget the context. I've only seen Grand Hotel and China Seas.

edit: thought this was funny, from Wiki - "China Seas is a 1935 American adventure film starring Clark Gable as a brave sea captain, Jean Harlow as his brassy paramour, and Wallace Beery as a suspect character."
 
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catalog

Well-known member
There's a bit of unintentional sideralism going on in the one i posted without colour cos it's a crop from the actual book and the page was not properly flat.

VTrDhBQ.jpg


I like the blue smoke in the colour one but you do feel his colour pieces in general are less good than his mono drawings.

I think this happens a lot with artists who are drawers not painters. Everyone eventually has to move to paint, cos you can get more done, but if you've been doing mono and using a pen for a while, the transition is tricky.
 

catalog

Well-known member
In the bio, Baker also talks about how he had trouble with people sitting for him, he basically got fed up with the various celeb and hoitie-toities who wanted him to do their portrait.

so a lot of the portraits in the sidereal sets are from photos... possibly why he went for the distending look, so he was doing something artisitc with a photo. i imagine he might have had a prejudice against photographs as a lot of fine artists do - using picture references is a bit of a touchy subject for drawers and painters ie whether to use them or not. but perhaps he just had to use what he could get.

photo reference forces a weird perfection, there's something off. some artists use the shapes to get perspective right i think, but do the details without the picture. but it's the sort of thing where it goes wrong if you don't fully commit. I've been trying to make paintings from some of my drawings and copying is really hard for me - there's a stiffness that comes about. you lose the impulsive mark a little.

i feel like the Beery might be from a photo but liz is from observation. i could be wrong tho, it's quite hard to tell, cos he's such a good artist.
 

catalog

Well-known member



And from a section called "Mind to Mind and How", this section was touches upon what I was referring to earlier:



A slap in the face, that first sentence, reminding me how easy it is to become charlatan out of having a bad faith in one's own nature. The answer? A constant maintenance. A waxing and waning spiritual clarity, rather than a securely final plateau.

edit: an answer to what question? This one: how does one avoid mistaking a bad faith for good one? By means of some eternal audit?

thanks for this btw - i love the sort of optical illusion nature of it. i was trying to explain it to a friend and i was saying it's like when you want a bird, but you have to forget you want a bird, put it out your head, so you don't have that stink of desperation.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Austin-Osman-Spare-010.jpg

image

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And S Grant i think, something's living in her eyes

austin-osman-spare--sidereal-portrait-steffi-grant.jpg
he is super good on the eyes. the two eyes in most of his portraits seem to be doing different things, this is quite a skill. i always look for it in the feet - if i see a full body portrait, i always look at the feet and you know it's good when the feet are up to different stuff. love this one by andre masson, the acephale

OT3TQ3B6nzZPdBtM8NvrAgWNljmge3ucQG8Vi9LK8BnoUfx2iAMIMjhapaYHlI_qCINrh2ZB0kQTV5vocN3G4APuPSxmmojLsP1KS-NVVL8Fx-ij9J_ORkW56jg
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I'd forgotten about it, but i always felt that Spare's portraiture of local working class people is some of his best work. It's like a hotline to this grimy, prewar London. It'd mentioned somewhere how these people would turn up to "sit" all spruced up, and Spare would find them totally uninspiring.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
thanks for this btw - i love the sort of optical illusion nature of it. i was trying to explain it to a friend and i was saying it's like when you want a bird, but you have to forget you want a bird, put it out your head, so you don't have that stink of desperation.
Sounds like Spare's magic tbh!
 

catalog

Well-known member
Didn't realise that the 70s popularisation of Spare probably began with an image of his being used as the cover for this magazine

Man_Myth_Magic_no1.jpg


"Like many people in the 1970s, I was introduced to the work of Austin Spare by Man, Myth and Magic, a seven volume “illustrated encyclopedia of the supernatural” published weekly in 120 112 parts by Purnell. My mother was a Dennis Wheatley reader so we had a couple of occult paperbacks in the house, among them one of William Seabrook‘s accounts of voodoo in Haiti and a copy of Richard Cavendish’s wonderful magical primer, The Black Arts, (later retitled The Magical Arts). Cavendish had been chosen as editor of Man, Myth and Magic and included occultist and writer Kenneth Grant on his editorial staff, a decision that gave the book’s producers access to Grant’s collection of Spare pictures. In a rather bold move, they launched Man, Myth and Magic in 1970 with a detail of a Spare drawing on the cover, a work often referred to as The Elemental although the authoritative Spare collection, Zos Speaks has it titled as The Vampires are Coming. It’s a shame that AOS didn’t live for a few more years to see this; after labouring in poverty and obscurity for most of his life he would have found his work flooding Britain, with this first issue on sale all over the country and the cover picture being pasted on billboards and sold as posters. It’s possible there were even television adverts for the book (although I don’t recall any), since there usually were for expensive part works like this."

 

sufi

lala
That weird place where they have a few AOS pics on permanent display iirc has a programme of talks http://www.thelasttuesdaysociety.org/listings/event/

some of which actually sound quite good - e.g. john waters and leonora carrington's daughter, david luke in amongst lot of other odd stuff
 

william_kent

Well-known member
The College of Psychic Studies in London will be displaying some of Spare's work this summer:

Strange Things Among Us

A room devoted to Austin Osman Spare will undoubtedly appeal to those who are fascinated by the occult and magick. Spare was an artist of great talent and we offer a rare opportunity to study some fine examples of his work, which will be accompanied by a large selection of important books on the occult including Aleister Crowley's Equinox and a first edition of Francis Barrett's The Magus from 1801.
 
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