The Wormwood Star: A Portrait of Marjorie Cameron and her Art by Curtis Harrington, 1956.

 

I've been looking looking for this on the web for ages (thanks Pedro!).  Marjorie Cameron is a figure of considerable mystique and fascination to devotees of the avant garde and occult in post-war America.  In the 40s, she was the lover, muse, and magickal partner of rocket scientist and occultist Jack Parson, a association made notorious by her involvement along with L Ron Hubbard in the Babalon Working; subsequent to the death of Parsons, Cameron was part of a fascinating nexus of lesser known bohemians and occultists who preempted the alternative lifestyle explosion of the Beats and hippies (see Spenser Kansa's bio Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron for a breakdown of this poorly documented scene); in 1954, Cameron's presence dominated Kenneth Anger's underground classic The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.  (I've blogged quite a bit about Cameron, the Babalon Working, and related scenes in the past - for example here, here, and here.) 

In the whirling intrigue of all these associations, it's easy to forget that Cameron was a brilliant artist in her own right.  In 1956, Curtis Harrington produced a short 16 mm portrait of Cameron.  (Another of her many fascinating associates, Harrington was a protegee of the great Maya Deren, often remembered for his Val Lewton-esque feature Night Tide.)  Primarily showcasing her artwork, and scored by Cameron reading her own poetry, Wormwood Star is a slight enough thing in a sense; but it is also an atmospheric, must-see glimpse of a true icon of the underground, in all her mesmeric and ever so slightly scary glory:     

 

Like Working without Working: The Spirit-guided Art of Augustin Lesage.

Via translinguistic other (via disinfo), I discovered the work of Augustin Lesage (1876 - 1954) today. There seems to be a dearth of English language information regarding the artist, but his French wikipedia entry informs us that Lesage was born in the north of France, and spent much of his early life working as a laborer in the coal mines near Saint Pierre les Auchet. It was while working underground that Lesage discovered his vocation: in 1911, a voice whispered to him "One day, you will be a painter."

Later, Lesage became active in local Spiritualist circles, and opened a regular channel of communication with the spirits via automatic writing. Once again, the voices from Elsewhere took a firm command of Lesage's artistic career; if he, or his French wiki is to be believed, they told him what paints and brushes to buy, and insisted that he worked on large, three metre square convases.

For the next two years, Lesage returned home from the mines and worked on these canvases, apparently guided at every turn by the spirits. Of this process, Lesage made a comment which speaks to the passive, receptive nature of creativity when it is operating at its highest pitch: "It was like working without working." The idea of spirit guidance may not be something that many contemporary readers are apt to take very seriously, but it is as good a metaphor as any to describe the essentially mysterious engagement with the unconscious (whatever that is) which often must be incurred in order to produce great art and science.

The disinfo post comments "They share a visual resonance with the often reported DMT visions of fantastic and unbelievably ornate architecture, dense vistas of cryptically purposeful temples-within-temples made of transparent jewels. I've seen these "places" on a few occasions, and it does make me wonder what was happening neurochemically in the brains of visionary artists such as Lesage, William Blake, Grant Wallace, or James Hampton and his posthumously discovered Throne of the New Millennium." Here are some pieces by Lesage; check out more at tranlinguistic other where the images can be clicked to view in greater detail:

The Weird Art of Clark Ashton Smith.

The brilliant author of feverish, verbose, and decadent pulp fiction Clark Ashton Smith is often regarded as second only to HP Lovecraft among the writers associated with the seminal pulp magazine Weird Fiction. However, whereas Smith lacked the visionary character and originality of Lovecraft's imagination, he was arguably the better writer in terms of form and prose, and a figure of various talents besides: Smith wrote poetry, sculpted, painted, and drew. The quality of his artwork varies, but some of it is very striking indeed: very otherworldly and downright weird. The following selection is taken from the eldritch dark, a website which contains an excellent miscellany of CAS materials:

the sciapods

forbidden barrier

scene in Atlantis

Atlantean priest

racornee

worship

untitled humanoid

weird sketch

hashish demon

Finally, a couple of covers for translated editions of CAS that caught my eye, also from eldritch dark:

The Occult Art of Rosaleen Norton.

Rosaleen Norton was an Australian occultist and artist whose work frequently ran foul of the law in the conservative Australia of the forties and fifties. In the early fifties, Norton moved to an area of Sydney known as King's Cross, a place which had become notorious as a red light district and nexus of organized crime and various bohemian/occult shenanigans. The Cross was also the home of the novelist, poet, journalist, and actor Dulcie Deamer, who was called the Queen of the Bohemians. Norton herself attained a significant degree of tabloid notoriety as "the Witch of King's Cross", amid a torrent of police raids, mostly unfounded tales of Satanic black masses and animal sacrifices, and a scandalous affair in which her friend and lover Eugene Aynsley Goosens was arrested by customs in possession of a considerable occult booty: some 800 erotic pictures, ritual masks and incense sticks. Something of the ambiance of the Cross in that period, and Norton's distinctive appearance and presence, is conveyed in this charming vignette: