Weird Wednesday

Austin Osman Spare: it's a name I've known for years but it was only fairly recently that I was able to get anything by him or learn more about him. I guess the above pictures by him say it all. An occultist who created his own form of magic, he was also an early experimenter with psychedelic drugs but soon found he could trip out and experience alternate states of consciousness without them. His stuff isn't easy to get. I have a couple of reprinted paperbacks, The Book of Pleasure and The Book of Satyrs, which ably demonstrate his brilliant draftsmanship and, in the case of the Book of Pleasure, his weird, slumped, boneless faces and forms, a glimpse of which you can see at the bottom of the middle illo above. I grabbed these pictures off the internet, though, because they're in colour - and the top one of the owl-winged, malignant goat-face is so powerful. The images came off a biography of Spare which you can find at the following blog, if you'd like to learn more about him: http://is.gd/cROML