Edward Hopper’s 1925 painting ‘House by the Railroad’ may have been one inspiration for film director Alfred Hitchcock in creating the Bates Motel for his film Psycho. Art critic Lloyd Goodrich described the painting as “one of the most poignant and desolating pieces of realism”. But there’s more to it than that; this is architecture at its most terrifying and, once seen, it’s impossible to un-think it.

Georg Salter was born in 1897. His family emigrated to the US where he worked as a designer at a time when books mattered in a way they no longer do. About his design for Kay Boyle’s novel, Generation Without Farewell, Thomas S. Hansen writes in his book Classic Book Jackets: The Design Legacy of George Salter:

“Salter’s abstract design prevailed over the author’s own wish to present images of amputee soldiers against a background of mutilation … Salter instead chose a symbolic approach showing battered Venetian blinds to symbolize a state of despair about cultural dissolution in postwar Germany.”

Some of his designs prefigure the work of modern day design houses such as Tomato.

“Thomas Wolfe was once his favorite author, though today he prefers Marcel Proust and André Gide, and in painting, his idols were Rembrandt, Daumier, and Goya, who would now be joined with Bonnard, Kokoschka and Vuillard,” American Artist magazine wrote in 1961 of Russell Hoban.

He is best known today for his novels – the blurbs of which hint that he “worked as a book illustrator before becoming a writer” – or for his children’s books. Few today would know that his art wasn’t just a temporary diversion, and yet his work included covers like this for Time magazine. His Joan Baez portrait took 16 days from commission to delivery, and he spent 10 or more of those working on the portrait, with at least one all-nighter required to finish the job. After all that, Baez hated it.

“I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, if we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Think of a time when you didn’t think you were capable of doing something, but then surprised yourself. How will you surprise yourself this week?

(Author: Ashley Ambirge)

Artwork: Frank James Harding Bell, aged three

The Vale of Health is a part of London’s Hampstead Heath, supposedly so named because it was spared by the Great Plague of 1665-1666. The Vale of Health is also my short story about a painting with a life of its own. It was inspired by the 1914 Henry Lamb portrait of the writer Lytton Strachey, a man who was ironically something of a stranger to good health; that is, considering he sat for Lamb in his Vale of Health studio at various times over a period of several years. Henry Lamb’s portrait of Lytton Strachey, one of the better-known members of the Bloomsbury Group, can be viewed online at the Tate Collection’s website. It’s an extraordinary painting, not least considering Strachey was supposedly in love with Lamb at the time. A brief excerpt of the story follows.

I. The Vanishing Point: “Here I am, somewhere in Time: Typo Blod, a man devoid of nationality. I find the notion of Time an elusive one. It and I make for uncomfortable bedfellows. But I think I could provide a history of myself, if necessary. At once, I am at London’s Liverpool Street Station bidding farewell to a lover (there is only ever one that counts…”