Box of delight

What do you see when you read the work of Edgar Allan Poe? The great age of the illustrated book is far behind us. Aside from cover designs, most modern editions of Poe’s work circulate in text-only form. That’s just fine, of course. Readers should be trusted to use their imaginations, and who can forget indelible descriptions like “The Tell-Tale Heart”’s “eye of a vulture—a pale, blue eye, with a film over it”? We need no picture book to make that image come alive.

The East beckons me — Japan — but I’m a bit worried that I’ll get too Zen there and my writing will dry up. - David Bowie, 1980

David Bowie’s longstanding fascination with Japan pervaded his work, becoming the gateway through which many of his fans began to explore that country’s cultural traditions and aesthetics.

Having the ability to virtually explore the history, back stories, and cultural significance of artworks from over a thousand museums generates nowhere near the excitement as a feature allowing users to upload selfies in hopes of locating an Instagram-worthy doppelgänger somewhere in this vast digital collection.

A friend of mine, a fellow American living in Seoul, just recently put up a vlog in which he at once admires a piece of street art he happens upon here and remarks on how much the presence of the stuff bothered him back in the States. It illustrates an important point about the very medium of street art, graffiti, tagging, or whatever you happen to call it: context is everything — or rather, context and skill are everything.

If you’ve ever mistaken an Egon Schiele for a Gustav Klimt, you can surely be forgiven—the Austrian modernist don served as a North Star for Schiele, who sought out Klimt, apprenticed himself, and received a great deal of encouragement from his elder. But he would soon strike out on his own, developing a grotesque, exaggerated, yet elegantly sensual style that shocked his contemporaries and made him a leading figure of Austrian Expressionism.

No one art form has done more to shape the world's sense of traditional Japanese aesthetics than the woodblock print. But not so very long ago, in historical terms, no such works had ever left Japan.

For the 500-year anniversary of Hieronymus Bosch‘s death, the MOTI Museum in Holland commissioned a modern re-interpretation of the Dutch painter’s famous medieval painting, “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (circa 1490). If you’re not familiar with Bosch’s enigmatic creation, explore these two items before you do anything else:

You'd be forgiven for thinking the images in this list are photographs. But we assure you, they're not. Each and every one is hand-drawn. Here, some seriously talented illustrators have pulled out their best pencils and drawing techniques to create some truly exceptional pencil art

Take a look at these incredible tiny sculptures carved from the end of a pencil crayon!