Dubliners has been funded!

Cross-posted from Wake in Progress

De Selby Press has passed their funding goal for the illustrated Dubliners! Thanks to everyone who’s got involved, whether by ordering or book, sharing the link online, telling their friends, or simply sending encouragement, it’s all meant a lot to us.

To celebrate, here’s a recap of all the illustrations I’ve shared so far, in order. And don’t forget, if you haven’t ordered a copy yet, there’s still plenty of time to get one along with a lot of enticing Dubliners-related swag at the fundraiser page.

Wake in Progress at Urban Light

Cross-posted from Wake in Progress. 

 Thanks to everyone at Urban Light for hosting my work during the Phinneywood Art Walk last night, and thanks to all of you who came. I for one had a great time, met lots of interesting people, and stayed up way past my bedtime. The Instagram below is the only photo I know of to prove that the event took place. You might make out in the back there that, as well as the Wake, we also previewed some of the Dubliners illustrations. If you weren’t able to make it, then I hope you’ll come to the BIG art walk on August 8th, because I’ll still be there.

Preorder Illustrated Dubliners

De Selby Press has launched their campaign to fund the first edition of Dubliners illustrated by me. If you’d like to preorder a copy, you’d be doing them a big favour to do it now to help them meet their goal! Rewards include signed editions, posters, signed prints, and an mp3 of The Lass of Aughrim, the song from “The Dead.” If you already have a thousand copies of Dubliners clogging up your bookshelves (it’s weird how they seem to multiply, isn’t it?), then please share the link with all your Joyce-loving friends. Thank you!

Just go here.

Big in Finland

For that Finnish-speaking Finnegans Wake enthusiast in your life, here’s a treat in time for Christmas. It might have been as much as a year ago that I was asked to contribute an essay to an anthology on Finnegans Wake entitled What Does Finnegans Wake Mean? In Finnish. Obviously I jumped at the chance. I’ve seen my illustrations in print a few times now, but I think this is the first time something I’ve written has been published. It’s very exciting, of course, but also disorienting to see my name above an essay I can’t read. I wish I could read the whole book, as the scraps that I’ve taken the time to transcribe into Google Translate have seemed very promising. Each of the essays is also illustrated with one of my pictures! Many thanks to the editor, Ville-Juhani Sutinen! If you do read Finnish, you can take a look at the publisher’s website here.

Cross-posted from Wake in Progress

Vestoj

I really enjoyed doing this series of illustrations for Vestoj Magazine, to illustrate an article about the justice system’s sexist attitude to the fashion industry.

Promotional Mailers

I’ve just finished preparing my first ever batch of promotional mailers. I had big ideas of putting together some kind of fancy package, but decided not to get too clever for my first attempt. Fly, my pretties!

Baby picture of the Universe

My editorial career has claimed its first casuality: this illustration – about photographing the afterglow from the Big Bang – was killed in favour of photographs. Which was probably a good idea, actually.

China’s Massive Water Problem

Another IHT-riffic editorial illustration. (I’ll chuckle over that for weeks.) [link]

Another Earth

Here’s an alternate version of the SARS illustration that they didn’t go for. I’m really into the brush pen right now.

How SARS was contained

Another illustration for the Herald Tribune, for an op-ed about the international response to the SARS outbreak ten years ago.

International Herald Tribune

Here’s my first (is there an emoji for touching wood?) illustration for the International Herald Tribune, for an op-ed about the reconstruction of Japan after the tsunami.

On Frans Masereel’s The City

Those in the know, who follow my Finnegans Wake illustration project, will have recognised that I’ve been shamelessly ripping off the art of Frans Masereel for months. The City is a 100-page series of unconnected woodcuts without words known as an “image novel”, and I’ve been fascinated with it ever since I discovered it. Frans Masereel was a Belgian artist who lived in Paris in the early 20th Century. Although he also produced paintings, he’s best remembered now for his series of woodcut prints. I haven’t managed to see many of his other works, but of what I have seen, The City, published in 1925, is by far the most interesting. A sprawling, polyglot metropolis in perpetual night, the unnamed city could be a vision of Babel. The surrounding countryside is visible in only one image; in the others, the forced, disjointed perspective sends buildings climbing up the page and crowding out the sky. On one level, Masereel draws his disconnected images into a universalised vision of dizzying modernity, stalking the crowded streets from palaces to slums, from the crush of traffic to the swelter of factories; from murders and executions to cabarets and brothels, riots and revolutions. But what makes the book enduringly fascinating is the shadow of overbearing menace that casts every scene with the aspect of a dark and troubling dream. Sex, death and generalised fear infect the atmosphere in lurid advertisements and suggestive statuary, as if city is being overrun not by revolutionaries, but by its inhabitants’ own nightmares. The whole series can be viewed online in atrocious quality, but it really deserves to be seen in print. Dover has a fairly hideous edition, which I was saved from having to buy when I found this eccentrically produced copy, a tiny little book in a burlap dust jacket, with an introduction by Stefan Zweig. I carried it around with me everywhere until eventually it was put in the washing machine with my jacket. It’s never been the same since.