A few years ago I had the pleasure of working with the Canadian writer Sean Johnston on a limited edition art book called A Long Day Inside the Buildings for JackPine Press, a Saskatoon-based chapbook publisher. It was based on his short story of the same name.
Here’s the description from the JackPine website:
“A Long Day Inside the Buildings is the story of an elementary school teacher struggling to be true to his students and teach them about a world that increasingly baffles and belittles him.”
It’s an extremely surreal story and I was excited about the idea of providing illustrations that echoed the same kind of feeling Sean’s writing created.
The idea of the surreal and the setting in the elementary school were my inspiration. I remembered educational books from when I was a kid like the How and Why Wonder Book and the Golden Book Encyclopledia. the Golden Book Encyclopledia had several volumes, each one dedicated to words beginning with letters in a certain range of the alphabet, like “Aardvark to Army.” They had these beautiful covers by Cornelius De Witt featuring combinations of incongruous objects, all of which began with letters in the alphabetical range of the book. This incongruity put me in mind of that line the surrealists loved so much “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.”
So I decided I’d create illustrations for a volume of an imaginary children’s encyclopedia, a dream encyclopedia. I wanted it to seem familiar at a glance but mysterious on close examination.
I painted the front and back cover illustrations in acrylic on watercolour paper and the interior illustrations are pencil with washes of India ink.
Here are a few images from the book:
