This just looks like a book…it’s really just paint on canvas. I’ve wanted to do something like this for ages, and seeing A.J. Hateley‘s vintage paperback cover designs for non-existent books finally tipped the scales from daydreaming to doing something about the idea.
The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is a favorite of mine for its sensuous language and steamy equatorial images, mainly, though I also chuckled at the way Rhys cleverly, ironically braided her novel’s ropes in with the silken cords of Charlotte Bronte‘s Jane Eyre…like a cuckoo sneaking her vulgar egg into a respectable bird family’s nest.
Sort of the way, come to think of it, that my painting tries to hide among the Penguins on my bookshelf… 
As paintings go, this one’s pretty bland…pretty, but not really saying anything. I just had the image of seaweed viewed through a cross-section of seawater, and stuck to it, even when it was obvious that there wasn’t going to be much tension or interest in a flat sea and some seaweed. There are events from the book that would have made for much more intriguing cover images, but I didn’t feel capable of a composition with burning parrot against night sky and French windows, or something dramatic like that. It’s okay for a book cover, though.
I’m especially delighted with the way it looks hanging—like I’ve got a book stuck on the wall.
Filed under: books + poetry, Inspirations, paints and pens, stuff i've made
