Uploaded March 2018 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Dani Soon was born in a small remote town in Korea in 1991. Living in such a remote town meant there was not much to do, so books and drawing became her biggest pastime enjoyment. Being at one with Mother Nature also allowed her imagination to run wild and the rustic environment had a critical impact on her decision to be an artist. Even though she now lives in a hectic city, she still draws inspiration from reading books and working outside which allows her to absorb her natural surroundings.
[More at: soonillustration.com/about]
Music: Vidna Obmana "Streamers of Stillness"
Dani Soon was born in a small remote town in Korea in 1991. Living in such a remote town meant there was not much to do, so books and drawing became her biggest pastime enjoyment. Being at one with Mother Nature also allowed her imagination to run wild and the rustic environment had a critical impact on her decision to be an artist. Even though she now lives in a hectic city, she still draws inspiration from reading books and working outside which allows her to absorb her natural surroundings.
[More at: soonillustration.com/about]
Music: Vidna Obmana "Streamers of Stillness"

![Edmund Dulac
Edmund Dulac (born Edmond Dulac; October 22, 1882 – May 25, 1953) was a French-born, British naturalised magazine illustrator, book illustrator and stamp designer. Born in Toulouse he studied law but later turned to the study of art the École des Beaux-Arts. He moved to London early in the 20th century and in 1905 received his first commission to illustrate the novels of the Brontë Sisters. During World War I, Dulac produced relief books and when after the war the deluxe childrens book market shrank he turned to magazine illustrations among other ventures. He designed banknotes during World War II and postage stamps, most notably those that heralded the beginning of Queen Elizabeth IIs reign.
Born in Toulouse, France, he began his career by studying law at the University of Toulouse. He also studied art, switching to it full-time after he became bored with law, and having won prizes at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He spent a very brief period at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1904 before moving to London.
Settling in Londons Holland Park, the 22-year-old Frenchman was commissioned by the publisher J.M. Dent to illustrate Jane Eyre. and 9 other volumes of works by the Brontë sisters. He then became a regular contributor to the Pall Mall magazine, and joined the London Sketch Club, which introduced him to the foremost book and magazine illustrators of the day. Through these he began an association with the Leicester Gallery and Hodder & Stoughton; the gallery commissioned illustrations from Dulac which they sold in an annual exhibition, while publishing rights to the paintings were taken up by Hodder & Stoughton for reproduction in illustrated gift books, publishing one book a year. Books produced under this arrangement by Dulac include Stories from The Arabian Nights (1907) with 50 colour images; an edition of William Shakespeares The Tempest (1908) with 40 colour illustrations; The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1909) with 20 colour images; The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales (1910); Stories from Hans Christian Andersen (1911); The Bells and Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe (1912) with 28 colour images and many monotone illustrations; and Princess Badoura (1913).
After the war, the deluxe edition illustrated book became a rarity and Dulacs career in this field was over. His last such books were Edmund Dulacs Fairy Book (1916), the Tanglewood Tales (1918) (including 14 colour images) and the The Kingdom of the Pearl (1920). His career continued in other areas however, including newspaper caricatures (especially at The Outlook), portraiture, theatre costume and set design, bookplates, chocolate boxes, medals, and various graphics (especially for The Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate).
He also produced illustrations for The American Weekly, a Sunday supplement belonging to the Hearst newspaper chain in America and Britains Country Life. Country Life Limited (London) published Gods and Mortals in Love (1935) (including 9 colour images) based on a number of the contributions made by Dulac to Country Life previously. The Daughter of the Stars (1939) was a further publication to benefit from Dulacs artwork - due to constraints related to the outbreak of World War II, that title included just 2 colour images. He continued to produce books for the rest of his life, more so than any of his contemporaries, although these were less frequent and less lavish than during the Golden Age.
Halfway through his final book commission (Miltons Comus), Dulac died of a heart attack on 25 May 1953 in London.
[from Wikipedia]
Music by Addamz, Goldmund Edmund Dulac](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/V9n4xtAJiuw/mqdefault.jpg)
![Leonor Fini
Leonor Fini (1907–1996) was an Argentinian surrealist painter, designer, illustrator, and author, known for her depictions of powerful women.
Fini had no formal artistic training, yet she was familiar with the traditional Renaissance and Mannerist styles due to her upbringing in Italy. Her first major exhibition was in 1936 in New York at Julian Levy’s Gallery. Fini was considered part of a pre-war generation of Parisian artists, and outlived most of her artist peers. Surrealist artists in France became very interested in her once she began setting herself up as an artist, and came to know her as important in the movement. She is mentioned in most comprehensive works about surrealism, although some leave her out (and she did not consider herself a surrealist). In 1943, Fini was included in Peggy Guggenheims show Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century gallery in New York. In 1949 Frederick Ashton choreographed a ballet conceptualized by Fini, Le Rêve de Leonor (“Leonors Dream) with music by Benjamin Britten. In London, she exhibited at the Kaplan gallery in 1960 and at the Hanover Gallery in 1967. In the summer of 1986 there was a retrospective at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris that drew in more than 5,000 people a day. It featured over 260 works in a variety of media. A tribute to the many artistic and creative avenues that her career took throughout her lifetime, there were 100+ watercolors and drawings, around 80 theatre/costume designs, and about 70 paintings, 5 masks, etc. Many of her paintings featured women in positions of power; an example of this is the painting La Bout du Monde where a female figure is submerged in water up to her breasts with human and animal skulls surrounding her. Madonna used the imagery in her video, Bedtime Story in 1994. In the spring of 1987 she had an exhibition at London’s Editions Graphique’s gallery. Fini was also featured in an exhibition entitled “Women, Surrealism, and Self-representation” at the San Francisco Modern Museum of Art in 1999.
She painted portraits of Jean Genet, Anna Magnani, Jacques Audiberti, Alida Valli, Jean Schlumberger (jewelry designer) and Suzanne Flon as well as many other celebrities and wealthy visitors to Paris. While working for Elsa Schiaparelli she designed the flacon for the perfume, Shocking, which became the top selling perfume for the House of Schiaparelli. She designed costumes and decorations for theater, ballet and opera, including the first ballet performed by Roland Petits Ballet de Paris, Les Demoiselles de la nuit, featuring a young Margot Fonteyn. This was a payment of gratitude for Finis having been instrumental in finding the funding for the new ballet company. She also designed the costumes for two films, Renato Castellanis Romeo and Juliet (1954) and John Hustons A Walk with Love and Death (1968), which starred 18-year-old Anjelica Huston and Moshe Dayans son, Assaf.
In the 1970s, she wrote three novels, Rogomelec, Moumour, Contes pour enfants velu and Oneiropompe. Her friends included Jean Cocteau, Giorgio de Chirico, and Alberto Moravia, Fabrizio Clerici and most of the other artists and writers inhabiting or visiting Paris. She illustrated many works by the great authors and poets, including Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire and Shakespeare, as well as texts by new writers. She was very generous with her illustrations and donated many drawings to writers to help them get published. She is, perhaps, best known for her graphic illustrations for Histoire dO.
Fini is considered a great contributor to the feminist movement because her paintings often depict impertinent young women in scenes that empower their image.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: Alio Die Honey Mushroom, Part III Leonor Fini](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VlshNGriEnc/mqdefault.jpg)
![George Barbier
George Barbier (French: [ʒɔʁʒ baʁbje]) (1882–1932) was one of the great French illustrators of the early 20th century. Born in Nantes, France on 16 October 1882, Barbier was 29 years old when he mounted his first exhibition in 1911 and was subsequently swept to the forefront of his profession with commissions to design theatre and ballet costumes, to illustrate books, and to produce haute couture fashion illustrations. For the next 20 years Barbier led a group from the Ecole des Beaux Arts who were nicknamed by Vogue The Knights of the Bracelet—a tribute to their fashionable and flamboyant mannerisms and style of dress. Included in this élite circle were Bernard Boutet de Monvel and Pierre Brissaud (both of whom were Barbiers first cousins), Paul Iribe, Georges Lepape, and Charles Martin. During his career Barbier also turned his hand to jewellery, glass and wallpaper design, wrote essays and many articles for the prestigious Gazette du bon ton. In the mid-1920s he worked with Erté to design sets and costumes for the Folies Bergère and in 1929 he wrote the introduction for Ertés acclaimed exhibition and achieved mainstream popularity through his regular appearances in LIllustration magazine. Barbier died in 1932 at the very pinnacle of his success. He is buried in Nantes.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: Vidna Obmana A Scenic Fall George Barbier](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WJwtbE59zmw/mqdefault.jpg)
![Denis Forkas
Denis Forkas Kostromitin (1977, Russia) explores mythology and religious symbolism through the ancient Mediterranean tradition of conveying images. Denis’s work is firmly rooted in the aesthetics of antiquity and he seeks to restore the interrupted artistic legacy of nameless masters by introducing contemporary techniques – notably acrylics, – in his process. The synthesis of tradition and innovation forms a framework for the artist’s studies of dreams and philosophy. Forkas’s works have been exhibited around the globe and featured in numerous international music releases as album covers. The artist currently resides in Moscow.
[from:https://fulgur.co.uk/artists-and-writers/denis-forkas-kostromitin/]
Music: Oöphoi A Slow Beating of Wings Denis Forkas](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WjbyMGOxm_g/mqdefault.jpg)
![Jungho Lee
These whimsical illustrations will appeal to bibliophiles thanks to their surreal use of books. Created by Korean artist and illustrator Jungho Lee, the images incorporate the beauty of books into everyday environments, creating thoughtful, dream-like scenes. As an open door, a star-filled lake, a morning slice of pie or an airplane’s wing, books take on new forms in Lee’s pieces without ever being read.
Inspired by the surrealists Rene Magritte and Quint Buchholz, Lee – the winner of the 2016 World Illustration Awards – hand draws his images with charcoal and watercolors before scanning and digitally layering them to reach the desired illusory effect. Wondrous and whimsical, the pictures are the next best thing to getting lost in a book.
[from:https://plainmagazine.com/korean-illustrator-jungho-lee-book/]
Music: Hakobune Love Knows Where Jungho Lee](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XVid7dhBIS4/mqdefault.jpg)
![Peter Birkhäuser
The son of an oculist, Birkhäuser was born and raised in Basel. His mother died early and he was brought up by his father in a rationalistic, agnostic environment. He wanted to be a painter from an early age, and left grammar school to study at an art school under Basel artist Niklaus Stoecklin.
In his early career as an artist, he produced still-life and landscape paintings, ex libris plates, stamps, cartoons for the satirical magazine Nebelspalter, posters, and portraits. He met his future wife Sibylle Oeri in the early 30s, and they married in 1939.
One evening, while working in his studio, he was struck by the image of a moth fluttering against the window. He painted this image in 1944, and later interpreted it as symbolic of his own state of mind: the moth, representing his soul, was struggling against the glass to reach the light, representing consciousness. This image precipitated a crisis in his career, resulting in a period of stagnation and depression.
During this period, he encountered works of C.G. Jung, and began to analyze his dreams. He and his wife entered Jungian analysis with Marie-Louise von Franz. Over the next 35 years, he collected and worked on over 3,400 of his dreams, discussing them with von Franz and corresponding with Jung himself.
As he interpreted them, his dreams often reflected images of himself as stultified by artistic tradition, and urged him to break with his previous stylistic constraints. In 1956, he achieved an artistic breakthrough with his painting The Worlds Wound, the first of a long series of works painted directly from unconscious dream images.
His new works were not well received by the Swiss art community, and it took several years before they would achieve sufficient recognition to provide Birkhäuser and his wife with a satisfactory income. Most of the initial support for his new work came from a younger audience, largely based in the U.S.
In 1971, his wife of 32 years died, and he developed a serious lung complaint. Nevertheless, he produced a number of his most significant paintings in the last five years of his life.
Birkhäuser died in Binningen in 1976.
In 1980, a selection of his later works was published in the book Light from the Darkness: The Paintings of Peter Birkhäuser, edited and introduced by his daughter and son, Eva Wertanschlag and Kaspar Birkhäuser, with commentary on the paintings by Marie-Louise von Franz. In addition to his paintings, the book also includes a 1970 lecture by Birkhäuser titled Analytical Psychology and the Problems of Art.
I experience a power within myself which is not the same as my conscious ego. It has forced me to adopt a path quite foreign to my conscious attitude, a path which totally contradicted my will and everything I considered important. Before I was able to obey this power, I first needed to be crushed and almost destroyed. I often felt it was a pity this process had taken so long, but now, looking back over thousands of dreams and the sacrifices of a long, hard development, I can see how valuable the experience has been.
— in conversation with Dean Franz, ca. 1975
[from Wikipedia]
Music: Alio Die Underwater Fields Peter Birkhäuser](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XnDmBApbiyk/mqdefault.jpg)
![Martin Lewis
Martin Lewis (7 June 1881 – 1962) was an Australian-born American etcher.
Lewis was born in Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia on 7 June 1881. He was the second of eight children and had a passion for drawing. At the age of 15, he left home and traveled in New South Wales, Australia, and in New Zealand, working as a post hole digger and a merchant seaman. He returned to Sydney and settled into a Bohemian community outside Sydney. Two of his drawings were published in the radical Sydney newspaper, The Bulletin. He studied with Julian Ashton at the Art Societys School in Sydney. Ashton, a famous painter, was also one of the first Australian artists to take up printmaking.
In 1900, Lewis left Australia for the United States. His first job was in San Francisco, painting stage decorations for William McKinleys presidential campaign of 1900. By 1909, Lewis was living in New York, where he found work in commercial illustration. His earliest known etching is dated 1915. However, the level of skill in this piece suggests he had been working in the medium for some time previously. It was during this period that he helped Edward Hopper learn the basics of etching. In 1920, after the breakup of a romance, Lewis traveled to Japan, where for two years he drew and painted and studied Japanese art. The influence of Japanese prints is very evident in Lewiss prints after that period. In 1925, he returned to etching and produced most of his well-known works between 1925 and 1935 Lewiss first solo exhibition in 1929 was successful enough for him to give up commercial work and concentrate entirely on printmaking.
Lewis is most famous for his black and white prints, mostly of night scenes of non-tourist, real life street scenes of New York City. During the Depression, however, he was forced to leave the city for four years between 1932 and 1936 and move to Newtown, Connecticut. His work from this period includes a number of rural, night-time and winter scenes in this area and nearby Sandy Hook. When Lewis was able to return to the New York City in 1936, there was no longer a market interested in his work. He taught printmaking at the Art Students League of New York from 1944 until his retirement in 1952. Lewis died largely forgotten in 1962.
Lewiss print, Shadow Dance, sold for $50,400 at the Scenes of the City: Prints, Drawings & Paintings of New York 1900–2000 auction in New York on October 2010, setting a record price for the artist at auction.
The Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, staged an exhibition of Martin Lewis prints in October 2011 drawn from the collection of Dr. Dorrance Kelly. The Bruce Museum said of Lewis: Recognized as one of the premier American printmakers of the first half of the 20th century, Martin Lewis left an indelible mark on the landscape of the art world. Lewis was an acknowledged master of the intaglio techniques of printmaking, experimenting with multiple processes including etching, aquatint, engraving and drypoint. A highly skilled printer, Lewis created magnificent impressions that captured the energy, bustle and occasional solitude of all aspects of city life in New York. With his remove to Connecticut in 1932, Lewis instigated another topic through his printmaking: country life. This firmly entrenched Lewis as a prominent America scene artist, who captured the intersection between the urban and rural environments and shed light on the slowly emerging suburban culture.
Institutions holding Lewis work include the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and others.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: Alio Die Intramundia Martin Lewis](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XvEzE1R87Vo/mqdefault.jpg)
![Leonora Carrington
Leonora Carrington OBE (6 April 1917 – 25 May 2011) was an English-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City, and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s. Carrington was also a founding member of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Mexico during the 1970s.
Carrington was born in Clayton Green, Chorley, Lancashire, England. Her father was a wealthy textile manufacturer, and her mother, Maureen (née Moorhead), was Irish. She had three brothers: Patrick, Gerald, and Arthur.
Educated by governesses, tutors, and nuns, she was expelled from two schools, including New Hall School, Chelmsford, for her rebellious behaviour, until her family sent her to Florence, where she attended Mrs Penroses Academy of Art. She also, briefly, attended St Marys convent school in Ascot. In 1927, at the age of ten, she saw her first Surrealist painting in a Left Bank gallery in Paris and later met many Surrealists, including Paul Éluard. Her father opposed her career as an artist, but her mother encouraged her. She returned to England and was presented at Court, but according to her, she brought a copy of Aldous Huxleys Eyeless in Gaza (1936) to read instead. In 1935, she attended the Chelsea School of Art in London for one year, and with the help of her fathers friend Serge Chermayeff, she was able to transfer to Ozenfant Academy in London (1935–38).
Carrington stated that: I painted for myself...I never believed anyone would exhibit or buy my work. She was not interested in the writings of Sigmund Freud, as were other Surrealists in the movement. She instead focused on magical realism and alchemy and used autobiographical detail and symbolism as the subjects of her paintings. Carrington was interested in presenting female sexuality as she experienced it, rather than as that of male surrealists’ characterization of female sexuality. Carrington’s work of the 1940s is focused on the underlying theme of women’s role in the creative process.
In Self-Portrait (1938), Carrington offers her own interpretation of female sexuality by looking toward her own sexual reality rather than theorizing on the subject, as was custom by other Surrealists in the movement. Carrington’s move away from the characterization of female sexuality subverted the traditional male role of the Surrealist movement. Self-Portrait (1938) also offers insight into Carrington’s interest in the ‘alchemical transformation of matter and her response to the Surrealist cult of desire as a source of creative inspiration.’ The hyena depicted in Self-Portrait (1938) joins both male and female into a whole, metaphoric of the worlds of the night and the dream. The symbol of the hyena is present in many of Carringtons later works, including La Debutante in her book of short stories The Oval Lady.
Her book The Hearing Trumpet deals with aging and the female body. It follows the story of older women who, in the words of Madeleine Cottenet-Hage in her essay The Body Subversive: Corporeal Imagery in Carrington, Prassinos and Mansour, seek to destroy the institutions of their imaginative society to usher in a spirit of sisterhood. The Hearing Trumpet also criticizes the shaming of the nude female body, and it is believed to be one of the first books to tackle the notion of gender identity in the twenty-first century. Carringtons views of sexuality, however, differ from contemporary feminists in that she sees maternity as a key experience to femininity. Carrington stated, We, women, are animals conditioned by maternity.... For female animals love-making, which is followed by the great drama of the birth of a new animal, pushes us into the depths of the biological cave.
Leonora Carrington died on 25 May 2011, aged 94, in a hospital in Mexico City, as a result of complications arising from pneumonia.
[from Wikipedia]
My first Leonora Carrington video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDDc650j-zM
Music: Alio Die & Antonio Testa Honey Mushroom IV Leonora Carrington](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YAU8743KRzk/mqdefault.jpg)
![Wilfried Sätty
Wilfried Sätty (born Wilfried Podriech; April 12, 1939 – January 31, 1982) was a German graphic artist best known for his black and white collage art.
Born in Bremen, Germany, Sätty lived through multiple Allied bombings of Germany during World War II. Sätty later moved to San Francisco in 1965 where he got a job at Bay Area Rapid Transit as a draftsman. Later, Sätty began publishing his illustrations with East Totem West, a small poster and notecard company running out of the bay area. On January 31, 1982, Sätty died as a result of a fall from a ladder in his house.
He released two collage volumes, The Cosmic Bicycle (1971) and Time Zone (1973), as well as a number of other collections. His works have been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the National Museum, Warsaw.
[from Wikipeda]
Music: Alio Die Honey Mushroom Wilfried Sätty](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YKUK6oH9MU0/mqdefault.jpg)
![Camille Saint-Saëns - Aquarium
Le Carnaval des Animaux (The Carnival of the Animals) is a musical suite of fourteen movements by the French Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saëns.
Le Carnaval was composed in February 1886 while Saint-Saëns was vacationing in a small Austrian village. It was originally scored for a chamber group of flute, clarinet, two pianos, glass harmonica, xylophone, two violins, viola, cello and double bass, but is usually performed today with a full orchestra of strings, and with a glockenspiel substituting for the rare glass harmonica.
Saint-Saëns, apparently concerned that the piece was too frivolous and likely to harm his reputation as a serious composer, suppressed performances of it and only allowed one movement, Le Cygne, to be published in his lifetime. Only small private performances were given for close friends like Franz Liszt.
Saint-Saëns did, however, include a provision which allowed the suite to be published after his death, and it has since become one of his most popular works. It is a favorite of music teachers and young children, along with Prokofievs Peter and the Wolf and Brittens The Young Persons Guide to the Orchestra.
Aquarium
Strings without double-bass, two pianos, flute, and glass harmonica: This is one of the more musically rich movements. The melody is played by the flute, backed by the strings, on top of tumultuous, glissando like runs in the piano. The first piano plays a descending ten-on-one ostinato, while the second plays a six-on-one. These figures, plus the occasional glissando from the harmonica—often played on celesta or glockenspiel—are evocative of a peaceful, dimly-lit aquarium.
[from Wikipedia]
Artwork:Leonora Carrington Camille Saint-Saëns - Aquarium](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YVpl-RNzdE4/mqdefault.jpg)