Augustus John

At the very bottom as seen here you can see the signature of Aleister Crowley.

Around this time Aleister Crowley made the acquaintance of portraitist Augustus John as seen here.

Augustus John was one of the few people Crowley admired, stating, quote, I will not acquiesce in anything but the best of its kind.

In this sense, I rarely feel at home unless with a supreme genius like Augustus John.

Augustus John would sketch Crowley over the years, and here are a few of the black and white sketches that remain available.

The neon's just getting warmed up, and so are you.

Right now, Monday through Thursday, noon to 6, it's time to zip to dip.

Ian Fleming is the writer of the James Bond novels, and Ian Fleming was alleged to be Crowley's later life handler.

And it's interesting because Ian Fleming's mother was the paramour of a guy whose name is Augustus John, who was a portrait artist who did portraits of all the famous people of England, including two of Crowley himself.

So there's all kinds of strange connections.

Anyway, so these guys all knew Crowley.

He was always watching.

At school in Bathurst, he wrote to his mother asking her to find him a secondhand easel and books on the work of Augustus John and Jacob Epstein.

He developed what his biographer calls, "An insatiable appetite for discovering how certain artists had viewed their motifs and expressed them in paint, and for finding what made their talent shine above that of others." Not just what they made, how they made it.

What was the secret? How do you get from the thing in front of you to the thing on the canvas, and how do you make it not just accurate, but alive? He was asking this question at 14.