Summer reading / research - on vampires

 I often look to folklore and legends for inspiration. I listen to several podcasts about the stuff and recently read or reread some books on the history of vampires. I don't have plans to make a film or write a story involving vampires but they are fascinating and their history is mixed up with other folklore and legend. 

The First Ghosts: A rich history of ancient ghosts and ghost stories from the British Museum curator by Irving Finkel

Very interesting book talking about the translated cuneiform tablets in the British Museum that detail the earliest ghost stories. Could have a been a dry read but the author has an entertaining style and obviously loves his work. 

Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires: The Rules to Determine True and False Cases by Antoine Augustin Calmet

A 1700s discussion of all manner of supernatural phenomenon. How could I resist that title? Well, I wish I had to be honest. The chapters are usually short and have notes at the end of each but the author wraps everything in a Christian/Catholic blanket that smothers any hope of learning much about the legends of the past except the God must have approved of them or they were hallucinations or whatever. It gets very close to the real reasons people might have believed in such things but then vers off in to it's on religious mythology. It does mention some stories mentioned in the first book on this list which means those tales were still circulating 1000s of years later.

The Vampire: A New History by Nick Groom

A new book less focused on individual folklore but on the history of the concept of the vampire and how in before relatively recent times it was common to think of ghosts, werwolves and vampires as the same thing. Very well researched and makes it points with some humour and interesting asides. 

And  finally.... Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality by Paul Barber

A book I reread or use as reference all the time, it's my favourite source for bloodsucking lore. 

Reading is Fundamental

I often speak (and write) about how drawing is the basic skill of all the visual arts... and it is. In addition to that, one might add that reading is also on that that short list of all important competences. 

How is reading essential to the visual arts? The most important way might be how it forces your mind to come up with and fill in details with no external stimulus. In effect, it trains your mind's eye to compose images and encourages an internal dialogue independent of what you see in front of you. I think this is helpful, if not essential in transmitting ideas from your head to whatever type of canvas your art is transferred to. 

The images that form while reading, though certainly derived from your real life and visual experiences, can be more reflective of your personality and worldview. You create a world influenced by the abstraction of someone else's words, but the interpretation is all your own. I have to confess that while I have been heavily influenced by silent film in my art (for example), it's the stories I have read throughout my life that bring me to choose one subject over another. The details and the feelings I imagined in those tales are what I try to bring to life in a visual way.