Illustrating Moby-Dick One Page at a Time

Since August, artist Matt Kish has worked his way page-by-page through Herman Melville‘s Moby Dick–illustrating each page along the way.

Page 109 is pictured above, a painting entitled: “I will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.” Inspired by artist Zak Smith‘s project to create one illustration for every page of Thomas Pynchon‘s epic Gravity’s Rainbow, he tackled the mother of all modern novels. Fiction Circus passed a long the link to this obsessive project.

Here’s more from the site: “I would do one piece a day, every day, until I was done. And I have a full time job too. And a wife. And a life. For me, that kind of pace was almost inconceivable. I decided to just do whatever I wanted with the art, even if it looked crude or raw. After all, I had no one to please or disappoint but myself. Impulsively, I grabbed the first paperback edition of Moby-Dick I could find, which turned out to be the Signet Classic edition from 1992 with 552 pages. Looking back, maybe I should have thought things through a bit more since I’ve seen quite a few editions with around 400 pages, which would have saved me an awful lot of time.”

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.