HIGHER CALLING - Max Leonard
Why do road cyclists go to the mountains?
After all, cycling up a mountain is hard - so hard that, to many non cyclists, it can seem absurd. But, for some, climbing a mountain gracefully (and beating your competitors up the slope) represents the pinnacle of cycling achievement. The mountains are where legends are forged and cycling greats make their names.
Higher Calling explores the central place of mountains in the folklore of road cycling. Blending adventure and travel writing with the rich narrative of pro racing, Max Leonard takes the reader from the battles that created the Alpine roads to a Grand Tour climax on the ‘highest road in Europe’, with stories of courage and sacrifice, war and love, obsession and elephants along the way.
The cover was designed by The Handmade Cyclist and you can see more of their work here.
The Heart of the World – Nik Cohn
After dissecting the world of rock’n’roll in Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (http://bit.ly/1Yye4MC) Nik Cohn takes us on a New York journey like no other. From Battery Park to Times Square, he discovers ‘the world within itself’ - Broadway.
Escorted by a drum-playing Russian taxi driver, fuelled by duck soup and whiskey and sleeping in crackhouse hotels, Cohn encountered pickpockets, dancers, old magicians, disgraced politicians, epic storytellers, part-time messiahs, and an unforgettable transvestite called Lush Life.
It’s an unforgettable, hallucinogenic journey and a love letter to a dream of a New York now lost.
The Heart of the World is published by Vintage Classics.
BLUE, 1993, film by Derek Jarman
This is Jarman’s last film made in the months before he died and chronicling his AIDS-related illness and sight impairment. The 79-minute experimental film consists of a single shot of vivid blue accompanied by a soundtrack and various interwoven voices. The blue is a direct reference to Yves Klein’s blue known as “International Klein Blue”.
The film is currently on display at Tate Britain, London
BEYOND THE GREAT WAVE : Hokusai
Today sees the opening of an exhibition of the work of the great Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1769-1849) at the British Museum, London.
The exhibition focuses on the work he produced in the last 30 years of his life when he was at his most creative and produced his most notable work. This includes his celebrated woodblock print Great Wave and the series of prints Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji. The first five prints of this series were printed entirely in tones of blue, Hokusai using a palette of indigo and the newly-invented imported chemical pigment, Prussian blue.
BLUETS - Maggie Nelson
And so I fell in love with a colour – in this case, the colour blue – as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.
Bluets is part essay, part poetry. It is a meditation on desire and suffering seen through a blue lens. It tells of new love and then heartbreak, and about the life long obsession by the author with the colour blue. It is a collection of fragments and the ideas are presented in short paragraphs, which winds its way past famous blue figures like Yves Klein, Leonard Cohen and Billie Holiday and quotes Barthes.
Here, the designer describes how she created the cover:
My brief was to create something beautiful. I read the text and was mesmerised. I immersed myself in the exploration of all things blue. I collected, painted and photographed. I wanted to reflect the potency of blue, and respond emotionally to the text. This book was just too brilliant – I wasn’t satisfied with anything I had created.
I had painted patterns in blue ink, but none were strong enough as stand alone pieces. Just as the text was layered… I experimented with layering the patterns in Photoshop and set them against a black background. The blue became almost iridescent, sharp and electric. Now I had a cover.
Vintage are also publishing The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson in Vintage
LANDSCAPE WITH CHARON CROSSING THE STYX (1515-1524) by
Joachim Patenir. Museo del Prado, Madrid
Among the many subjects Leonardo da Vinci studied and wrote about, he had this to say on painting and the colour blue:
In an atmosphere of uniform density the most distant things seen through it, such as the mountains, in consequence of the great quantity of atmosphere which is between your eye and them, will appear blue. Therefore you should make the building… wall which is more distant less defined and bluer… five times as far away, make five times as blue.
The Flemish artist Joachim Patenir was an early master of landscape painting and his work exemplifies the Leonardo’s theories on atmosphere and distant things, most beautifully. This painting with its distant blue mountains is typical of Patenir’s work, with the landscape dwarfing the figures and the ostensible subject of the painting.
BLUETS - Maggie Nelson
We are very excited to be publishing Bluets next week, here it is in all its blue glory.
FAIENCE WEDJAT-EYE AMULET c. 1090-900 B.C. The Censnola Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
This Egpytian amulet is made of faience a type of ceramic made from powdered quartz with a vitreous appearance. Egyptian faience was used for making small objects and jewellery in various bright colours with blue-green being the most common. This amulet, the Eye of Horus, symbolised protection, good health and royal power.
CROCODILE figure c. 1850-1700 B.C. Rogers Fund, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
This Egyptian figure of a crocodile is in Egyptian blue, a pigment used in ancient Egypt for 1000s of years until Roman times. The colour blue was highly prized and regarded, and as naturally occurring minerals to make blue were scarce, Egyptian blue is the earliest example of a synthetic pigment. It was known to the Romans as caeruleum, from which we derive the English word cerulean.
Victoria Line from Londonensi subterraneis by Phil Shaw
This stunning print was seen last week at Photo London, Somerset House, and is one of a series “bookshelf” prints by artist Phil Shaw.
More of his work can be seen at his gallery, Rebecca Hossack.
PRINCESSE DE BROGLIE 1851-53 by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Robert Lehman Collection, 1975, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
This surely has to be one of the most beautiful paintings of a blue satin dress conceivable? The cool blue colour and the texture of the dress are such that you feel you could reach out and touch it, or if the sitter were to move, you would hear it rustle.
This was Ingres’s last commission painted towards the end of his life and is a masterpiece of neo-classicism.
BLUETS BOOK DROP
1st June see’s the publication of Bluets, a beautifully constructed narrative on a personal obsession with the colour blue by critically acclaimed author Maggie Nelson. To celebrate it’s publication in the UK, throughout this week we will be dropping books at various blue destinations. Follow our twitter @cmykvintage and our instagram @vintagebooksdesign for information regarding the locations of the books and to be in with the chance of finding one. If you do, tweet a picture of yourself with the book tagging #bluets to be in with the chance of winning this framed print.
MADONNA AND CHILD by Filippino Lippi. The Jules Bache
Collection, 1949, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
From Il Libro dell’Arte the author Cennino Cennini (c.1360 – before 1427) writes:
On the Character of Ultramarine Blue, and how to make it:
Ultramarine blue is a colour illustrious, beautiful, and most perfect beyond all other colours: one could not say anything about it, or do anything with it, that its quality would not still surpass.
The deep blue colour pigment ultramarine was made from precious lapis lazuli, which was brought by Italian traders to Italy from mines in Afghanistan – hence its name derived from the Latin ultramarinus meaning “beyond the sea”.
In this painting of the Madonna and Child (c.1483-84), the artist Filippino Lippi has used the finest ultramarine in the Virgin’s robe. This act of material display would have been requested and specifically paid for by the wealthy Florentine banker Filippo Strozzi who commissioned the painting.
