Illustrations

I have updated the illustrations page with the latest of my works; and have a couple more which are nearing completion. It won't be long until the main body of the new illustrations is finished, at which point I will need to invest in some Mayan resource materials to complete the illustrated portion of the project.

I find this type of illustrating interesting and time intensive. It is less a process of artistic creation, than it is a study in stillness. A capturing of a physical place in a metaphysical construct. This is the first time I have created an illustration with more concern to the context than the content.

They are, after all, representations of a memory discovered in an inner metaphysical landscape. That the content lends validity and momentum to the letter that they are included within is important, yet it is the monochromatic style and intense level of detail used to create them that ultimately empowers the narrative, both episodically and in its entirety.

I hope that the viewer comes away feeling the intense stillness and cold of the images. The memory they are formed from is past, and the world they are found in is dead and contradictory. With luck they will help to create a subtle tension in the reader's suspension of disbelief. Not a common narrative tool admittedly, but one which should, contradictorily, serve to draw the reader deeper into the overall narrative thematically.

The power of the strange and uncanny should never be underestimated in literature. Indeed the word uncanny holds a particular pertinence to this and all of my projects. To be specific the form of uncanny as seen in its German form 'unheimlich' and as described by Heidegger in Sein und Zeit. Without exploring this in detail, it is enough to say that uncanny means the anxiety experienced in the indefiniteness of reality. The collapse of everyday familiarity as the existential mode of being-in-the-world conflicts with the mode of the not-at-home (Apologies to Heidegger fans for a bastardised form of his text).

So it is the brake down of the definiteness of the borders of reality that will hopefully pull the reader on. I can admit that the text as it is still needs more to get it to this point; and certainly there are authors who have achieved this affect with far greater haunting precision, but hopefully with more work I will get there.

I will look to put up more illustrations as they are completed; and I'm sure when I feel stuck with the words, I will pick up the pencil as succour.