What is it about artists and Moby-Dick? From Rockwell Kent's classic prints and Barry Moser's elegant line drawings to Will Eisner's graphic novel, not to mention Frank Stella's multimedia undertaking and Jackson Pollock's Blue, Melville's novel has long cast a spell on artists. Matt Kish is the latest to come under it, big time.
Inspired by Zak Smith's illustrations for Gravity's Rainbow, Kish hid away in a closet studio for 18 months, illustrating selected lines from every page (552 of them) of the Signet edition! Primarily applying ink pen, marker, crayon and watercolor to the actual pages, he has produced beautifully imagistic and impressionistic illustrations, heirs to the surreal and dada, with a little "yellow submarine" thrown in. Here is a cornucopia of images: whales as floating teeth or a green snake, Ahab as a disembodied skull, Ishmael as a wooden buoy. The carefully selected found paper creates haunting images upon images.--Thomas Lavoie, former publisher