Ian Miller is a British illustrator who has worked mostly in the fields of fantasy, horror and science fiction. 

Chris Beetles
Cannongate

Desmond Morris
Thames & Hudson

Honored for their idiosyncratic and imaginative works, the surrealists marked a pivotal moment in the history of modern art in Britain— pioneering the Surrealist movement between World War I and II. Many artists banded together to form the British Surrealist Group, while others carved their own, independent paths.

Hands up who knew Morris was a surrealist artist before he became a zoologist? Not me but apparently so and here he provides an overview of many of the artists he knew at the height of the movement with a beautifully presented series of pen portraits of thirty four British Surrealist artists and featuring 107 illustrations, most of them in colour. 

Featuring artists such as Francis Bacon, Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, Tristram Hillier, Paul Nash. Roland Penrose and Ceri Richards if you're already fairly knowledgeable on the artists included then this book perhaps isn't for you as the portraits provide a pretty brief - and occasionally bitchy - overview of the lives of the artists with little to no critique of their work. But if like me many of these folks are new to you then this makes for an attractive primer giving a couple of examples of each artists work with just enough background info to tantalise. 

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Bruce Lacey (with R.O.S.A. B.O.S.O.M.)

As this damnable year continues to take it's toll in what Cyclobe's Stephen Thrower described yesterday as being like "a Rapture for interesting people" this morning I find out that the world has also lost the artist and musician Bruce Lacey.

Lacey's pursuit of his muse and the humour he brought to his creations meant that he walked a path that brought him into contact with many of the counterculture figureheads of the British arts and entertainment worlds from the 1950s onwards including The Goons, The Beatles who got him to play George Harrison's gardener in Help!, Fairport Convention who wrote a song about him (see below), Ken Russell who made a short film about him (see slightly further below) and Dave Allen who featured him (at 25:27) in his fantastic film about English eccentrics (see all the way down below).  More recently Trunk Records released an amazing retrospective of his music called The Spacey Bruce Lacey (btw - I heartily recommend clicking that there link for a really interesting article about Lacey by William Fowler of the BFI)

So R.I.P. sir.  We thank you for being so very you.

At the very end of the 1970s and into the early years of the 1980s a book called 'Masquerade' created by an artist named Kit Williams inspired a minor furore that resulted in people digging up chunks of the English countryside looking for a Golden Hare that the author had made and buried somewhere.  Hidden within the book were clues as to the location of this buried treasure.  The book became a smash and the ensuing scavenger hunt was big news for a short while.

The book itself is a series of 15 of Williams' paintings that tells the story of a hare who loses the gift he's transporting from the moon to the sun which becomes the object of the hunt.

The finding of the hare has become mired in controversy - see here - and the actual solution to the puzzle was spectacularly convoluted.  Below is an extract from the Wikipedia page (that the above link takes you to) because I'm not even going to try and explain it...

The solution to the Masquerade puzzle is elaborate. In each painting, lines should be drawn from each creature's left eye through the longest digit on their left hand to a letter in the border. Then from left eye through the longest digit on their left foot, right eye through the longest digit on their right hand and finally right eye through the longest digit on their right foot. This is only done for any eyes that are visible in the drawing. The resulting letters form individual words, revealed either by anagramming or by applying the order hinted at by the Sir Isaac Newton painting, in which all of the creatures of the book are represented as puppets hanging in a line from left to right.
Decoding and following this method reveals the nineteen-word message:

CATHERINE’S LONG FINGER OVER SHADOWS EARTH BURIED YELLOW AMULET MIDDAY POINTS THE HOUR IN LIGHT OF EQUINOX LOOK YOU

Taking the first letter indicated by each painting, the acrostic “CLOSE BY AMPTHILL” is revealed. Properly interpreted, the message told one to dig near the cross-shaped monument to Catherine of Aragon in Ampthill Park, at the precise spot touched by the tip of the monument’s shadow at the stroke of noon on the date of either the vernal or autumnal equinox.
Many additional hints and "confirmers" are scattered throughout the book. For example, in the painting depicting the Sun and the Moon dancing around the Earth, the hands of the two figures are clasped together, pointing at the date of the spring equinox.

Hope that didn't make your head hurt too much.

Williams' experience of the Masquerade phenomena caused him to distance himself from the public eye but he continues to produce work including a number of major pieces of public art including Cheltenham's 'Wishing Fish Clock' and the Dragonfly maze in Bourton-on-the-Water both situated in the county where he maintains his studio.

He remains a fascinating and unique artist utterly and triumphantly out of step with modern art trends who has spent his life creating a body of work that reflects himself and the world as he sees / wishes it.

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the death of one of Britain's finest and most celebrated book illustrators, Arthur Rackham.

Rackham, born in London on 19th September 1867, began his career as an illustrator in 1894 and continued to work up until his death from cancer in 1939.  His dexterous, bold and detailed line work partnered with his eye for the essence of a story, the beauty of his figurework and a sense of mischievous dark humour made him hugely popular at various points in his career and it is a fame that continues unabated to this day.

His portfolio is huge but he is perhaps most notably associated with Alice in Wonderland (for which his illustrations are arguably as famous as those of original illustrator John Tenniel), Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, A Midsummer Night's Dream (along with various other Shakespeare works), Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination and various books of fairy tales from around the world.