Call Me Ishmael – Drawing Moby Dick
JA
May 09
Matt Kish, a librarian/artist based in Ohio, is in the midst of an ambitious project – doing one drawing for each page of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Speaking to the Book Bench’s Nick Liptak, Kish described the idea like so:
I was familiar with artist Zak Smith’s project to create one illustration for every page of Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ and, after a good friend mentioned to me how he remembered that I would go on and on about ‘Moby-Dick’ in college, the idea to do something similar for ‘Moby-Dick’ came to me in a flash. I didn’t plan the endeavor very well though and simply picked up the first paperback copy of ‘Moby-Dick’ that I could find. It turned out to have five hundred and fifty-two pages, which meant a year and a half of daily work. I’ve since seen copies with as few as three hundred and sixty pages and stopped myself from slipping into despair from that!
Kish chooses a single passage or fragment as inspiration and usually completes his drawings on found paper, such as VCR instruction booklets or scrap pages. Given the daily grind, not everything is immediately arresting, but a few do stand out from the pack. You can view all illustrations done to date on Kish’s website.
Page 131: The Fin-Back is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. Very shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the remotest and most sullen waters…
Page 205: …for few men’s courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action…
Page 055 : They had made a harpooner of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre now.
Page 094 : It was nearly six o’clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when we drew nigh the wharf.
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