Book Cover Illustrations

Sometimes an artist just has to create what’s rattling around in his brain. This is such artwork… An illustration without a home (as of yet).

Binary suns. The suns are mirrored in the glowing globes in the forgotten mechanism at the base of the painting, and in the broach and forehead jewelry of the heroine.

Other elements in the painting simply appeared, painted in because they seemed to belong. These include the distant buildings (or are those tombstones?) and the spray of grass across the front of the mechanism that has been torn apart by some ancient force.

What is the story here? Your guess is as good as the artist’s. Let your mind create the story to explain what you see.

I am never quite sure whether such artwork is done for fun or because of an unnatural compulsion that forces the artist work, throwing other projects to the wind (and letting the lawn care slide). There is a drive that must be realized, pushing ahead reproduce the picture that has sprung full-grown in the mind. (In this case, the mind’s eye view was initiated by a rejected sketch for a character on an actual book cover.)

This suggests that at least sometimes creativity is perhaps more illness than good mental health.

Yet what other compulsion leaves behind pleasing results? Perhaps then some mental illness is creativity derailed.

At any rate, it seems that artwork is often an enigma as mysterious to the viewer and the muse as it is to the artist who created it.

Now it’s time to get busy doing some real work to pay the bills.

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When he’s not creating artwork for his own enjoyment, Duncan Long is a freelance book cover illustrator. You can see more of his book cover illustrations at: http://DuncanLong.com/art.html
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