Wednesday, 22 January 2020

Homage to a Butcher



20-01-2020.

It is a collage, but a digital one, most of his illustrations I cropped a bit then mixed it all up.It's got me thinking now - if I've got time I'll write it out. Its reminding me of a large hanging from Rajasthan
I love his border colours and the way he carefully laid it all out, put together with a lot of love.



Charles Dellschau
Homage to a Butcher.




It started off as a study of a note book by Charles Dellschau, concerning aeroplanes & the design thereof.















The first thing that grabbed me was the bright colourful, yet earthy borders quite a comparison to the flying machines.
















I thought that the best way to study them would be to work with them.
At present, I am thinking of ways to represent a fictional games board & thinking along those lines I felt that his borders would fit in and even solve a linear problem.



simplicity in a nut shell!


Eventually, I ended up with a Ludo board which would have various rectangles into which; I could insert some of his illustrations. & combined that with an old fashioned Cluedo board.



I suppose this one had the flavour that I was ultimately after!





Two images that I cropped to fit into the frame more comfortably.





I started to work it as a kind of collage, only digitally. A kind of cut & paste affair in a stencil type fashion in that I was putting the boundaries onto the images rather than the other way round.


a PNG file meant that the white areas are in fact transparent.


putting the boundaries onto images.









future frame?









Charles Dellschau

Charles Dellschau



His story is one shrouded in mystery, almost lost forever, intertwined with secret societies, hidden codes, otherworldly theories and seemingly impossible inventions before his time. Unseen for decades and salvaged by a junk dealer in the 1960s from a trash heap outside a house in Texas, his entire body of work would later go on to marvel the intellectual world. But during his lifetime, Charles Dellschau had only been known as the grouchy local butcher.
a remarkable collection of strange watercolours and collage pieces. More than 2,500 intricate drawings of flying machines alongside cryptic newspaper clippings filled the pages, crudely sewn together with shoelaces and thread.
After his retirement in 1899, he took to filling his days by filling notebooks with a visual journal of his youth. He called the first three books, Recollections and recounts a secret society of flight enthusiasts which met in California in the mid-19th century called the ‘Sonora Aero Club’.
The Wright Brothers wouldn’t even make their famous first flight until 1903, but Dellschau draws dapperly-dressed men piloting brightly-coloured airships and helicopters with revolving generators and retractable landing gear. No records have ever been found of the Sonora Aero Club but Dellschau’s artworks hide a secret coded story. Whatever it was that he had to say was apparently too private even for his own notebooks and even today, much of the mystery has yet to be revealed.
A Mr. Pete Navarro, graphic artist and UFO researcher, heard about the “Flight” exhibition in 1969 and became enthralled. He believed there was a connection between Dellschau’s drawings and mysterious mass of “airship” sightings at the turn of the century across 18 states from California to Indiana. In 1972, he discovered that 8 remaining books of Dellschau were still sitting at the junk shop, unwanted and unclaimed. He bought the lot for $565 and spent the next 15 years obsessively decoding Dellschau’s work.

Some of his drawings tell of fatal crashes of the society’s airships, sabotage of other club members and the banning of members who talked about the secret organisation to outsiders. According to Dellschau, the club’s aero prototypes would travel the open roads disguised as gypsy wagons to avoid detection.









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