Wednesday, August 11, 2010

MOBY-DICK, Page 342

Title: At this juncture, the Pequod's keel had shot by the three German boats last lowered; but from the great start he had had, Derick's boat still led the chase, though every moment neared by his foreign rivals.

7.75 inches by 10.75 inches
acrylic paint and ink on found paper
August 8, 2010

6 comments:

  1. Tattoo and awesomeness alert!! High alert!!

    I looooove this one.

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  2. Thanks Hannah! This one was a real bear for me. I agonized over how to show this and went through about a thousand ideas in my head. Somehow I ended up thinking about book design - you know, the stuff that's actually on the boards of old books and not the dust jacket illustrations. There is often some incredibly beautiful, clean, simple design work down there, especially on books from the 1950s, for anyone willing to look. That inspired this, and in the end, a simple piece which only took me about 20 minutes to complete (including the drying of the blue paint) turned out brilliantly.

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  3. there is something klee-ish to this that i love. . . (about an earlier post: tickled that you are a fan of gormenghast too - long time since i had everybody reading it but it continues to be passed onto the next generation(s)
    cheers
    lizzy

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  4. Thank you Titus. I think it's amazingly difficult to pull of this kind of designwork in an effective way over and over again. I feel quite lucky to have captured lightning in a bottle this time, but I am in awe of those graphic designers that can do this so regularly.

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  5. Lizzy, wonderful that you mentioned Klee! He is one of the very first artists I can remember being deeply moved by, emotionally and aesthetically. His work is so pure and I could look at it for days, never stopping.

    I gather that, sadly, Mervyn Peake and the Gormenghast books are less well-known here in the states than they are in Europe. However they do seem to stay in print and I suggest them to as many readers as will listen, so I hope that is doing at least a bit to make his words more popular.

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