This book is the result of a problem I faced as an artist whenever I thought about one of my favorite writers—Samuel Beckett: how could I create images for a text that nearly defies being illustrated in any traditional sense? I had just finished designing a bilingual edition of Waiting for Godot marking the centennial of Beckett’s birth when, once again, this challenge firmly took hold of me and refused to let go. My solution was to invert the usual situation and make the illustrations the book. The final product follows in the tradition of the artist’s book: forty black and white images, as lean as Beckett’s diction itself, hang on his every word. The captions breathe life into my lines rather than the other way around. Seeing an image always depends on what we bring to it, including what we draw from personal memory. And images can keep changing when the clues change. It has forever intrigued me that, depending on context, the same simple line may be seen as a figure, a road, a tree, the horizon—maybe even the moon, since a large enough arc can appear to be straight as an arrow. The drawings in this book therefore may be props, backdrops, or the very space of a stage. But, they are invariably the characters in the drama. I visually play with the page and turn its limitations to advantage. For instance, what the reader sees through the paper is part of the overall experience. Once or twice an image is repeated in another context thereby becoming a different image. On occasion images are whimsically buried in the gutter. In every case the reader becomes aware of the tactility as well as the pleasure of the reading experience. Indeed, this is a book-lover’s book.(below) Of climbing heaven . . .
[click the image above to see more spreads from the book] Order WAITING: road tree evening moon from Xlibris.com.
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