Tuesday, January 29, 2013
THE DESERT PLACES cover
Now I can share the news. The series of illustrations I am in the midst of posting are all from a forthcoming book titled The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss. It will be released some time later this year by Chicago-based Curbside Splendor. The cover below is one of my illustrations in a beautiful layout and design by Alban Fischer. I'm really pleased with what Alban did here, and thrilled to be a part of this with one of my old favorite authors Robert Kloss and one of my new favorites Amber Sparks. Creating these illustrations as visual responses to this book has been intense, harrowing, and nightmarish but I am so fucking proud of the work it almost hurts. I'll have more information on how to order the book when that is available, and the cover will be polished up when I can get Alban a higher resolution image, but here is a rough cut.
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So damn cool to get a cover credit on this!
ReplyDeleteOh man i can't wait to hear what this is actually about.
ReplyDeleteHello Klaas! Like the best books, it is difficult to pin down exactly what The Desert Places is about. This is an early description from the editor, which comes as close anything: "A hybrid text pocket book that explores the evolution of evil in worlds both seen and unseen."
ReplyDeleteThat sounds incredibly interesting. I have always felt that the only way to write about the notion of evil is doing it obliquely instead of tackling it head-on (the academic way) because the nature of evil can only really be understood through experience and not through a "dissection" (if that makes any sense)/ study of its properties, and I get the feeling that is what this book intends to accomplish. I hope you understand what I mean by this because it really is the only way I can explain my thoughts.
ReplyDeleteThis is also why I think your drawings for the book are so amazing. They genuinely feel evil, like abstractions or condensed essences of various kinds of evils.
ReplyDeleteKlaas, your remarks are, I think, very perceptive and I agree. Writing about, or simply depicting the notion of evil, whether it is in film or art or something else, tends to lose power if it is done overtly and clinically. This book seems at first to attack those ideas furiously, in very direct language, but a closer reading reveals a far broader and more terrifying idea with much deeper implications. Coming, for me, after Heart of Darkness, it seemed to connect in some ways with that book and honestly it terrified me. I am trying to channel some of that sense of horror into these images.
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