#Stepane Melchior

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I feel as if not so many people know about the wonderful graphic novel version of Northern Lights/ The Golden Compass so I want to recommend it!

It was adapted by Stephane Melchior and drawn by Clement Oubrerie in French and was published in the last couple of years for the English speaking markets.

It took me a second to acclimatise to Ouberie’s style but I soon adored it. It’s so wild and free but detailed at the saem time. His vision of Lyra’s world feels so close to the feeling I got from the book. I love how he uses colours. Of the adaptations this is the one that includes that sense of the gritty and visceral that Pullman does. You feel the grubbiness of Trollesund, the stink of Lyra’s furs by the time she gets to Bolvangar etc.

I think the directors and/or writer of the BBC/HBO His Dark Materials definitely read this and took some ideas. Look at those second two pages - Lyra hiding in a space behind an ornate grill instead of the book’s wardrobe; escaping a lesson with a scholar out the window (even the angles are very similar there).

I also really love his Iorek. He reminds me a little of Kevin O'Neill’s Mr. Hyde from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen sometimes, and I love that. The screen adaptations (and most cover art) stick pretty close to what polar bears look like and make him look kind of immediately appealing, not really embodying the scary alien uncanniness Lyra feels when she first encounters him. But my idea of Iorek, perhaps because the first cover of the book I encountered was this, was always far more like this, occupying a sometimes uneasy middle ground between person and animal.

I also love what Ouberie does with Svalbard, it’s just how it should look, all incongruous classicism and rotting seal carcasses.

I believe Melchior has already published the first volume of The Subtle Knife in France, this with a new artist, I hope they translate it to English too!

Here’s the UK link to buy

And here’s the US one

[sophiechoir]

Artists I Like

(Listmaking is totally a creative exercise, right? Right? If that’s true then this is the longest running creative exercise I’ve ever indulged in lol)

Gerda Wegener - fashion & lesbian art nouveau/deco

Harry Watrous - enigmatic paintings of sophisticated women

Helen Frankenthaler - abstract expressionist paintings

Sergio Toppi - italian illustrations & comics

Dan Hillier - contemporary spooky angelic ink/print/collage

Mike Binge - 70s sci fi art

Gustave Dore - highly detailed wood-engravings prints, dante

Paul César Helleu - numerous portraits of beautiful society women

Roberto Ferri - making the old masters cool again

Gustav Vigeland - weird figure sculptures

NC Wyeth - one of america’s greatest illustrators

Andrew Wyeth - melancholy realism painter

Frank Frazetta - best fantasy & pulp artist

John Buscema - conan comics artist

Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez - wonder woman comics artist

Parker Hagarty - landscapes & figures

Henry Patrick Raleigh - star of golden age of illustration, high society drawings

Paul Lehr - 70s future-fantasy pulp illustrations

Stanley Meltzoff - 50s scifi/pulp cover illustrations

Alphonse Mucha - art nouveau

Kawase Hasui - japanese woodblock prints

Edmund Dulac - delicate detailed book illustrations

Makoto Takahashi - vintage shoujo manga

Harry Clarke - super detailed & dark art nouveau/deco illustrations

Sophie Lecuyer - contemporary spooky illustrations

Wassily Kandinsky - abstract geometry

George F. Kerr - book illustrations

Beatrix Potter - book illustrations

Mary Bauermeister - eclectic sculptures & drawings - geomancy

John William Waterhouse - Pre-Raphaelite paintings

Alexandre de Riquer - gorgeous mucha-esque posters & illustrations

Gianpaolo Pagni - patterned graphic designs

Giovanni Boldini - dynamic paintings/portraits, “Master of Swish”

Erté - art deco fashion ladies (new orleans!)

Cicely Mary Barker - fairy illustrations

Dorothy P. Lathrop - beautiful childrens book black n white illustrations

Kay Nielsen - glittering golden age illustrations

Coles Phillips - “fadeaway girl” golden age illustrations

Gustav Klimt - gold 💋

Koloman Moser - patterned art nouveau

Konstantin Tarasov - contemporary colorful & detailed digital drawings

Carlo Dolci - soft & dramatic chiaroscuro baroque religious portraits

Trung Le Nguyen aka Trungles - deviantart digital artist, colorful golden age mixed with anime illustrations

John Everett Millais - Pre-Raphaelite paintings

Arthur Rackham - English golden age illustrations, muted colors

Syd Mead - industrial & sci fi concept art

Mario Garbuglia - Barbarella set design

Henri Patrice Dillon - dreamy fadeaway muted illustrations/paintings

Frantisek Kupka - later Czech painter who began in representational art and evolved into pure abstraction

John Bauer - classic nordic fairy tale/myth illustrations

Aya Takano - superflat/anime but make it fine art

John Singer Sargent - heavenly portraits

Winslow Homer - masculine largely marine landscapes

George Barbier - art deco illustrations

Edward Okuń - polish art nouveau & symbolist painter

Robert Anning Bell - paintings & illustrations

Thomas Cooper Gotch - sorta preraphaelite paintings, portraits of girls

Jules Chéret - colorful french posters

Kaarina Kaila - dreamy soft children’s illustrations (almost kitsch)

Helen Hyde - japanese woodblock prints but actually they’re american

Melchior Lechter - paintings and book designs. “His hieratic, symbolic, decorative style combined gothic elements with art nouveau”

Jan Mankes - gentle unlined dutch paintings

Amrita Sher-Gil - contemporary indian paintings, mostly of woc

Sydney Long - australian watercolor landscapes

Carlos Schwabe - freaky religious/mythological symbolist paintings

Bob Pepper - groovy 60s-80s pulp illustrations

Frank R. Paul - scifi illustrations

Chéri Hérouard - La Vie Parisienne french illustrations

John Berkey - scifi illustrations/concept art

Aubrey Beardsley - fin de siecle black and white illustrations

Charles Caryl Coleman - pretty still lifes & landscapes, flowers & capri

Erich Schutz - Austrian illustrator of children's books, Schutz was influenced by Art Nouveau, and specialised in painting fairies and mermaids

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - French painter, printmaker, caricaturist and illustrator

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale - lush detailed paintings of richly dressed figures and scenes

Anne Claude de Caylus - not sure if he actually made them but print illustrations of peasantfolk

Friedrich König - Austrian prints & paintings, Klimt contemporary

Georges Barbier - french illustrations like erté

Betty Jiang - contemporary pretty pearly & dark digital art

Stephan Sinding - marble sculptures of lovers

Heikala - contemporary soft & sweet watercolor & ink illustrations anime inspired

Paul-Albert Besnard - french prints & paintings in between academic & impressionist

Henry Ossawa Tanner - biblical realism paintings

Norman Lindsay - etchings with lotsa great figures

Michael O’Toole - colorful landscapes

Caspar David Friedrich - moody Romantic paintings

Gian Lorenzo Bernini - iconic baroque marble sculptures

Francois Schuiten - french detailed architecture comic art

Adrienne Gaha - colorful contemporary half-abstract paintings

Tradd Moore - trippy silver surfer comic art

tono/rt0no (on tumblr) - super cute illustrations of victorian cats ;-;

Nanaco Yashiro - pretty colorful contemporary illustrations

Ramiro Sanchez - contemporary traditional painter, director of painting program at Florence Academy of Art

Isabella Fassler - contemporary colorful illustrations

Florence Harrison - art nouveau childrens book fairy tale illustrations

Shahzia Sikander - contemporary Pakistani-American visual artist

Atelier Heinrichs - trippy colorful collage covers for sci fi pulps

John Macallan Swan - pretty kitties

JC Leyendecker - our fave dapper gents

Frederick Sandys - pre raphaelite paintings

Stepan Kolesnikov - realist yet stylized russian paintings

Okumi Iyo - embroidered illustrations

William Henry Barribal - colorful art deco paintings

Ilya Glazunov - russian historical/orthodox paintings in the time of communism

Igor Karash - spooky illustrations

Daud Ahkriev - his drawings of fishermen

Seiichi Hayashi - pretty, contemporary japanese manga & illustrations ft women

Nola (nolawon.art) - pretty, detailed takashi murakami-esque illustrations

Harrison Fisher - classic american illustrator, pretty women

John Austen - gorgeous black n white detailed hamlet illustrations

Gustave Moreau - fantastical & aesthetic french paintings admired by proust

Ceri Richards - welsh abstract paintings of people indoors

Otto Mueller - highly textured angular colorful paintings with bold lines

Henri Privat-Livemont - Art Nouveau posters

Giovanni di Paolo - prolific painter and illustrator of manuscripts, including Dante's texts

Ben Reeves - contemporary painter, moody & blue-heavy collages of colors

Alex Niño - amazing abstracted comic artist

Ludovic Alleaume - dreamy french paintings

Yoshiko Fukushima - unsettling figures with strange colors, superflat paintings

Zinaida Serebriakova - kind realistic russian paintings of pretty women and children

Harold Robert Millar (H.R. Millar) - famous Scottish graphic artist and illustrator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Alice Marshall - delicate illustrations of fairies on black background

Stanislaw Kamocki - colorful Polish landscape paintings

Bertha Lum - American version of Japanese woodblock prints

Raphael Kirchner - art deco fashion illustrations

Tamara de Lempicka - highly stylized art deco portraits of ladies, polish

Phil Greenwood - bright pop-y floral landscapes

Rose Cecil O'Neill - vintage illustrations & cartoons

John Rush - great use of color in figure drawings

Jean Delville - otherworldly paintings

Paul-albert Besnard - monochromatic prints

Helene Schjerfbeck - modernist subtle portraits

Heinrich Lefler - beautiful detailed narrative paintings/illustrations

Maximilian Liebenwein - art nouveau illustrations

Franklin Booth - detailed pen and ink drawings

Ulla Thynell - dreamy contemporary illustrations

Jun'ichi Nakahara - japanese graphic artist, early manga

K.F.E. von Freyhold - playful German book illustrations

Beth Billups - contemporary abstract painter

William McGregor Paxton - interior scenes of woman like Henry James depicts them

Ida Rentoul Outhwaite - Australian illustrator of children's books. Her work mostly depicted fairies

Ernest Biéler - Swiss painter, draughtsman and printmaker

Junko Ogawa (@junk_junk_junk on ig) - surreal anime style drawings

Marianne Stokes - Austrian painter, one of the leading women artists in Victorian England

Lee Mullican - abstract paintings

Rae Klein - creepy surreal paintings