I saw these on 50 Watts, and I was just taken aback at how accurately the light in each scene was sketched. I mean seriously – check these out and tell me if you don’t have an exact idea as to how to light every one of these plates!
These are from a book called Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel (1913) by Austrian illustrator Alfred Kubin (1877- 1959):
First published in German in 1913 and widely considered to be Paul Scheerbart’s masterpiece, Lesabéndio is an intergalactic utopian novel that describes life on the planetoid Pallas, where rubbery suction-footed life forms with telescopic eyes smoke bubble-weed in mushroom meadows under violet skies and green stars. Amid the conveyor-belt highways and lighthouses weaving together the mountains and valleys, a visionary named Lesabéndio hatches a plan to build a 44-mile-high tower and employ architecture to connect the two halves of their double star. A cosmic ecological fable, Scheerbart’s novel was admired by such architects as Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, and such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (whose wedding present to Benjamin was a copy of Lesabéndio). Benjamin had intended to devote the concluding section of his lost manuscript The True Politician to a discussion of the positive political possibilities embedded in Scheerbart’s “Asteroid Novel.” As translator Christina Svendsen writes in her introduction, “Lesabéndio helps us imagine an ecological politics more daring than the conservative politics of preservation, even as it reminds us that we are part of a larger galactic set of interrelationships.”
So it’s not light Musical Theatre reading is the general gist…
Being able to sketch out light is so essential for Lighting Designers; I think that rendering digitally and pre-viz have perhaps caused a lack of teaching of this skill. It’s also not a skill that I never really mastered, which was why I learned how to do it on a computer. Ah, the circle of life…
