Friday, April 08, 2022
Leave the Blog This Minute!
No, no, not forever please!
But in those forlorn moments of your day when you are not happily and profitably passing the time here on Stripper's Guide, there is after all a whole world out there. And yes, I realize that 90% of it, as Sturgeon's Law tells us, is doo-doo. But today I must tell you about something that is not just within that 10% of the world that is worthwhile, but in that 0.5% that is downright sublime.
In the few moments of my life when I don't have my nose to the grindstone producing endless blog posts here, I stumbled across a Youtube channel run by a fellow named Pete Beard. Mr. Beard is an historian of illustration art who has produced an incredible and prodigious number of beautifully crafted videos about great illustrators.
Mr. Beard has a special fondness for obscure and utterly forgotten illustrators, and has produced over 70 different videos just on the subject of what he calls "Unsung Heroes of Illustration". Since these videos generally cover four illustrators each, that's around 300 different illustrators rescued from the realms of obscurity! Mr. Beard's taste is not just eclectic but well-honed -- the illustrators he discusses are for the most part unknown to me, but their obscurity is most definitely undeserved -- the quality of the work is jaw-droppingly wonderful. How the artists of these works could be anything less than celebrated names is a mystery to me.
Here are a few samples you can try, and I'll be surprised if you're not hooked and wanting many more:
Unsung Heroes of Illustration, installment #60
The Illustrative Genius of William Heath Robinson
The Art of Illustration, Part I
