Matt Kish didn’t go to art school. He doesn’t subscribe to an artistic school or follow in anyone’s footsteps. But his website, “One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick,” is a joy to explore, featuring illustrations based on Melville’s masterpiece that are at once witty and sober, exuberant and subtle.

Matt Kish’s project on the website is exactly what it sounds like: having picked up a Signet Classic edition of Moby-Dick, he has made it his mission to draw one picture for every page of the novel. According to his Bio page, “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.” Of course, that would have entailed fewer illustrations, and that, for us at Drunken Koudou, would have been sad indeed.

Matt was kind enough to “sit down” for an interview with Drunken Koudou over the last several weeks. Actually, we just e-mailed back and forth, but Matt has a winsome attitude that makes one feel like one is enjoying a quiet conversation over a good meal. Much like his own drawings, Matt’s casual style can mask a depth of analysis and insight. It can also be simply casual, and great fun.

Drunken Koudou: According to your website, you chose Moby-Dick for this project because it is your favorite novel. Why is that?

Matt Kish: I’ve read the novel several times during fairly significant times of my life, and each reading revealed more and more to me. I think for a lot of people, the idea of Moby-Dick, the white whale himself, is something fairly deeply rooted in the American consciousness and the pop culture landscape. Even people who have never read a line of the book know about the white whale, know about mad Ahab, and know that there is some kind of bitter struggle. As a child who was more or less obsessed with monsters and monster movies, Moby-Dick had a visceral impact on me because this was a monster that seemed real, that could have been real. I was given one of the fat little Illustrated Classics editions, a small square volume printed on cheap newsprint with an illustration on every other page. That was my first reading, a heavily abridged version long on action and short on any deeper thematic meaning. Nonetheless I loved that book almost as much as I loved the movie, and I kept returning to it. I read the unabridged novel first in junior high, then again in high school and college and several times as an adult. As I’ve grown, I’ve found more and more in the book. That ship, the tiny little Pequod, and the story of the men on board has always seemed to me to be an almost perfect microcosm of life. All of the contradictions, the struggles, the joys, the madnesses, the friendships, the bonds, the losses, and the often bitter search for some kind of meaning are all there. It’s a book with all of the answers if you have the patience to seek them out.

DK: Do you think Moby-Dick lends itself to this kind of endeavor?

MK: Honestly, I’m not sure. Some have asked me if I am attempting to tell the story of Moby-Dick with my illustrations: to, in a sense, adapt the novel visually so that a new “reader” could understand the novel and the narrative simply by viewing my pieces. I believe that creating that kind of experience visually would be next to impossible and a grave disservice to the text. Additionally, that would be more a graphic novel or a storyboard or something, and I’m not interested in either of those kinds of interpretations. Many of my illustrations depend on the viewer having some kind of familiarity with the novel itself, if not in detail then at least in general. I’ve tried very hard to subtly include some of the deeper themes and ideas in the work, and I think that a more thorough knowledge of the novel makes viewing my pieces more rewarding. On the other hand, I have made no significant attempt to broadly appeal to the general viewer. In a very real sense, seeing Moby-Dick through my illustrations means seeing the novel through my eyes, which can be both intensely limiting, deeply fascinating, or both. So to me, Moby-Dick is an absolutely perfect choice for illustration, a rich field of themes, symbols, ideas and characters to explore and wrestle with. But that point of view may start and end with me.

DK: This “rich field” that you talk about seems like it would be at once advantageous and difficult for an artist, since you have to choose what to illustrate, and how to do it. What has been the easiest piece for you to illustrate? The most difficult?

MK: I’m really not sure how artists work, or what their processes are. I’m not even sure if that kind of thing is discussed in art schools. I’ve been to enough art museums that I’ve seen numerous “studies,” where fine artists work through whatever image they are creating. I would guess that there is probably a great deal of conceptualizing, sketching, and perhaps pre-visualizing as well. For me, it’s always been the exact opposite, for good or ill. Almost everything I’ve ever done visually or creatively has been purely intuitive. Almost subconscious. For each piece, whether the illustrations were part of this Moby-Dick series or something else I’ve done in years past, I try to still my mind and reach a state of internal silence. Then I just let my mind wander and allow images to just flow through the mental theater. I let this go on for as long as it needs to, and with some very rare exceptions, I don’t put pen to paper until I have the image almost completely formed in my mind. Then, as quickly as possible, in what almost seems like a physical explosion of activity, I work as quickly and frantically as possible to take what is only in my mind and get it down somehow on paper. No studies. No conceptualization. No sketches. Just one single attempt. It’s a very hard way to work sometimes because the pressure is very high. I get one chance to get it right, and if I fail then it’s very very hard to start again. So, to return to the initial question, the first piece, “Call me Ishmael,” was the easiest because almost literally the instant I decided to begin this project Ishmael’s face leaped into my mind. The man with the sea inside of him. The clouds, the rays, and the name seemed to just flow from that without any real effort.

There has been no “most difficult” piece thus far, but as a whole, the first illustration of each of the primary characters after Ishmael has been monstrously hard. Queequeg, Starbuck, Stubb, Flask, Ahab, Tashtego, Daggoo, and eventually Fedallah. It’s fascinating because I think one of the biggest reasons those pieces have been so hard for me is that I actually have spent some time letting the ideas flow from my brain to various pieces of notebook paper in a series of loose sketches, which is completely counter to how I have always worked in the past. I worry that I have been overthinking those pieces. Knowing that those characters would appear time and time again lent an extra gravity to their first depiction, which was then followed by worries about conformity. Should Queequeg look the same in every piece? Should Starbuck? And so on. Those worries are hard to shake sometimes, and in a sense, the extra visibility this project has attracted have compounded these challenges because now, by putting the pieces online, I am inviting interpretation and critique. Generally, since this entire project has been a deeply personal response to Moby-Dick, I have made absolutely no attempt at all to cater to other viewers tastes or preferences. This is my version of Moby-Dick. No more, no less. That takes some of the pressure off.

Ultimately, as has already been seen with my various illustrations of Queequeg and to a degree Ishmael, there is no real, restrictive or tiresome consistency to the pieces. Sometimes Queequeg has arms. Sometimes he has a wing. Sometimes he has a mouth. Sometimes his head is a smooth oval. And so on. Again, these visualizations, especially after the first depiction, come unbidden to me. If I were to imagine my wife right now, I might think of her voice. Or the curve of her lips. Or her slender fingers. But with each of those powerful images, much is omitted. If I think of her smile, her legs don’t exist to me. If I am hearing her laugh, an image of her hips does not come to mind at all. So this visual journey through Moby-Dick is in some ways a kind of tunnel-vision journey. The viewer sees what I see, with all of the flaws and glories of my own vision.

DK: What kind of artwork were you creating before this project? Did you use any similar literary inspiration?

MK: Ah, we have now, finally, foundered on the rocks of my dirty little secret. I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about my own artistic past and generally trying to make some kind of sense of it, to impose some kind of pattern or logical progression on to what is a fairly jumbled mess. I’ve been doing that for almost 20 years now, mostly because the urge to make images is almost unbearably powerful in me while, paradoxically, my ability to make images, or at least my belief in my ability to make images, is severely hamstrung by a lack of skill, crushing financial circumstances, deep and lacerating self-doubt, and general confusion. So, to answer this, we have to go way way back.

I was a child of the 1970s, born of parents who were more or less hippies, and raised on a steady diet of prog rock (complete with Roger Dean album covers), Lord of the Rings-inspired nonsense, and monsters. Trips to the library thrilled me, and from the moment I was conscious of being able to read, I was also conscious of images and how they could elevate any passage of text, transforming it into something far more exciting. Honestly, I can not think of any time in my life when I have not been deeply intrigued by illustrated texts, picturebooks, and visual narratives. I think that was something that was formed so early in me that there was never even the option of developing in another way.

As I progressed through my childhood, I was a real square. I never let the prog rock thing go, and listened to it all through the 80s when everyone else was getting into New Wave and alternative rock. I played too much Dungeons & Dragons. I watched cartoons. A lot. I saved paper route money to buy comic books and art books, most of which centered on monsters, heroes, myths, and so on. I think this is a background I share with a lot of what currently passes for hip and edgy, like the Paper Rad / Ft. Thunder guys, the zine silkscreeners and stuff like that. That harkening back to childhood. That heavy fantasy element. I guess the big difference for me was that I really was a pretty good, pretty well-behaved, pretty mellow kid. I never smoked, I waited until I was 21 to get drunk, I more or less did what my parents told me (and got along with them too), and stuff like that. There wasn’t a whole lot of subversive, rebellious behavior other than wanting to pierce my ear.

So this love of art and of images and of visual narration was a constant companion. In elementary school, I could draw well enough to really stand out from the crowd. But this skill either steadily evaporated or everyone else caught up because by high school I was strictly average. And really really frustrated. I knew what I wanted to draw, but it never ever turned out like I imagined it would. No matter how hard I tried. So I kind of gave it up in my teens, and even though I kept reading the fantasy paperbacks and played Nintendo games with my brothers, I also started dressing a little better and trying to make friends with the ladies. That was fun. Almost as much fun as art.

By college, I had more or less given up on any real kind of creative endeavor. Yet all my friends and roommates were art majors of one kind or another, so I was always surrounded by the incredible blast of creative fury. I remember briefly attempting a printmaking class in college, but when I sketched out what I wanted to do with my first linocut, the professor very kindly but very firmly pointed out that I had created completely unrelated shapes and textures and the image was a mess. At the time I was devastated but in retrospect I am so thankful he did not encourage me to do something that I was not capable of doing well. The honesty hurt, but it was necessary.

Still, the urge to do something…anything…creative never went away, and when a friend came to visit one weekend (complete with too much beer and trucker speed) I learned from him all about black and white photography. This fascinated me because it was more a science than an art, since it involved timing and precise measurements and clear steps. As soon as I got my meager income tax return I bought a cheap 35mm SLR camera, an enlarger, and some basic darkroom equipment. I spent a few weeks shooting black and white shots of farm equipment, dying sunflower stalks, and all that typical moody college stuff. But since the idea of nude modeling had really been validated by my art major friends and college was full of beautiful women, I decided to start photographing nudes. I loved it, but, while I was ever a gentleman and never a sleaze, a lot of that love came from spending an hour or two in a room with a giggling naked college girl. Still, a few of the prints turned out alright, I enjoyed the darkroom process, and I was finally able to bend my will toward something creative that I actually had some skill at.

After a few years of this though, I got really tired with what I felt was the same thing over and over. You can only experiment with posing and high contrast for so long before you begin to question just what the hell it is you’re doing. Besides, I didn’t want to just be that guy that takes nude photos. I didn’t have a degree, I didn’t have a portfolio, I had never sold a print, I had never shown in a gallery, and I had never even tried. It was getting bad again. I remember the night it all changed with great detail. I was married to my first wife, living in the top floor of a very old house in an incredibly rural part of Ohio, and nearly in tears because of how frustrated I was with what I was doing in the darkroom. Looking back, it seems kind of stupid now, but what happened next was really transformational for me in a lot of ways. I ripped the strip of negatives I was working on out of the enlarger, put them against the tile floor with one hand, and started hammering at them with a filthy claw hammer. It didn’t go on for long, but for someone who, up until this point, had handled negatives with white gloved hands and kept them free of any speck of dust, this really shook things up. After a minute or two, I looked more closely at how the plastic film had been scarred, distorted, and scratched by the hammer. I decided to print an image from the negative and was absolutely thunderstruck with how the distressed photograph looked. I realize now that the technique was not at all new, and that these days that kind of thing is done digitally, ad nauseam, in every Nine Inch Nails video ever made. But none of this mattered then because I had come across that technique on my own, through my own tortured failures, outside of the influence of any real pre-existing aesthetic.

Instantly, I knew I could transform every photograph I had ever taken, and I started a months-long endeavor scratching and hammering and painting on and slicing and boiling and burying and unearthing negatives and printing almost 300 images. Later still, I began to shoot images with this kind of treatment in mind, adding masks and wings and ropes and lace to the nude models I was working with. This was one of the best times in my life creatively. After a while, I began to see some of the same things I was doing just about everywhere I looked, from Sandman comic book covers by Dave McKean to Tool videos on MTV. I’m not at all implying that I was the first, or that they stole anything from me. It’s far more likely that I had seen a lot of this imagery prior to my own efforts, internalized it, and then regurgitated it. I began experimenting very deliberately with blurriness, random elements such as never changing the focus of the lens or shooting images without looking through the viewfinder, and simply painting with light on the negative. I feel like I was really on to something there, but life intruded in some very bad ways. My wife and I ended up moving out of that rural house and ultimately split up several months later, although it was amicable.

I tried to continue with my photography but at that point the damage had been done. The end of the marriage had badly damaged my self-esteem and confidence, and it was easy to look at those early images of nude women with wings and masks, no matter how strangely distressed and distorted, and see it all as incredibly immature posturing. So in a move I regret to this day, I sold all of my equipment, smashed my camera, and burned every last negative, journal, sketchbook, and photographic print. Other than 15 or 20 images I had given to friends, nothing really remains from that time of my life.

Right around this time of transition, I had started drawing again. It was an antidote against the self hatred the photography was causing, and it was a way to stay creative. Also, I loved drawing because it was simple. I didn’t have to worry about spending tons of money on film and photo chemicals and dealing with friends who were kind enough to model nude but often flakey enough to never show up. Somehow I had come across outsider art and the work of Adolf Wolffli, a patient in a European asylum in the early 1900s. His work was, literally, incredible. I felt like my brain had exploded. And yet neither he, nor any outsider artist, had any kind of artistic education or training. They operated well outside of traditionally established art movements. And their art, while powerful and deeply unique, was rough and crude with poor anatomy and crooked lines and no depth and crazy compositions. Somehow, this freed me completely and I felt like I could just draw whatever I want and it didn’t matter.

So in the course of this art therapy, of this journey down the path of outsider art, I regressed. Back to my 1970s childhood full of 20 minute songs about angels and dragons and spaceships, nights spent reading Michael Moorcock paperbacks, and days playing D&D. Shockingly, comic books had never really played a big role in my life at any time, but I had read quite a few on and off and was always struck by the cosmic comics of Jack Kirby. So as I started drawing in the late 1990s, all these images came rushing back at me and I just kept putting down on paper these drawings of vast bio-mechanical vaguely divine beings. I was, in a really silly way, creating this kind of personal mythology and then illustrating it. I ended up giving most of those drawings to good friends, and sometimes I wish I had them back. So while photography was the first part of my creative life, these drawings were the second.

It’s easy to see how this, and my almost perverse adherence to the idea of visual narrative, led to me deciding to create a comic of my own. I named the comic Spudd 64 because Spudd had been a nickname of mine as a kid (probably because I have always been short) and June 4th, or 6/4 was my birthday. So (and this is almost embarrassing) Spudd, who was basically just a cosmic bean sprout that had been born on a talking starship, became this kind of cipher for me and the whole comic started off oddly symbolically autobiographical although you would have to know me really well to see how.

Within the last year or two though, I’ve started to feel a bit silly about all the cosmic stuff and the comic and the whole weird scene around the small press though. So if photography was phase one, and art and comics were phase two, I guess I’m in phase three. Moby-Dick. Something meatier. More symbolic. More universal. More abstract. I don’t know, I have a hard time putting it into words. While I am not at all ashamed any more of anything I have done creatively, I am often struck by just how disconnected the photography, the art, and the comics all seem. Rather than being different stages of one journey, they seem like branches on a road that I wandered down and then turned back from. That’s kind of why this Moby-Dick project was such an exciting idea. It locks me to a year or two of daily disciplined work. In a way, I don’t even have to think because I am following this road map from Melville. And I can sometimes look back at what I have done in the past and draw a little bit from it. It’s too soon to say whether this massive project is the culmination of phases one and two, and right now I don’t think it is. But we’ll see.

DK: What is the longest you have had to spend on one of these pictures?

MK: Interestingly enough, one of the biggest reasons I started this Moby-Dick project was because I had become deeply unhappy and frustrated with the way I was making art before. I don’t regret any of those efforts, and when I look back at a lot of those pieces I am still very proud of them. But they took forever. And I really mean that. Prior to Moby-Dick, my drawings were either black & white pen and ink pieces or elaborate Berol Prismacolor colored pencil efforts. In both media, I spent hours and hours filling every square inch with lavish detail. The pen & ink pieces were completed more quickly than the colored pencil pieces, but even those took 10 to 20 hours each. The colored pencil pieces took 40 to 60 hours each. A lot of this was because I was only able to put in an hour or so of working on art each day. I’ve generally had a full time job and at least one part time job and spending time with my then-girlfriend and now wife has always been a top priority. Plus there is always laundry, grocery shopping, eating and so on. Additionally, I was probably the world’s slowest artist, and I mean that literally. If you were to watch me draw, you would see the pen moving across the paper incredibly slowly and deliberately. It was not at all uncommon for me to only finish 6 to 10 drawings a year, and that pace just really frustrated me.

So with this Moby-Dick project I wanted to set for myself an almost brutal pace that would force me to find ways to work more quickly, more simply, and more efficiently. I also wanted to leave behind that kind of slavishly over-rendered detail that I was pouring into all of my previous art and do something much simpler, occasionally abstract, and very suggestive. While it has not always been easy, it has been truly transformative. For the Moby-Dick pieces, some of them, primarily those where I used spraypaint, have taken me as little as 20 minutes, from cutting the template to spraying the paint. The longest have only taken me around 2 or 3 hours, and in those cases a lot of that time is spent waiting for ink or acrylic paint to dry so I can apply the next color. It’s been a rather startling transformation for me, really. I’m not sure if this is the way I want to work forever because I do occasionally miss the finely polished detail of my earlier work, but for now it has really helped my process a great deal.

DK: You work with several different media – crayon, pen, photography. Is there a medium or style that you have liked most on the project?

MK: As I mentioned above, in the past I had really restricted myself to pen and ink or colored pencil exclusively. So jumping into this project and deciding to use any and all media, from ballpoint pens to collage to spraypaint and so on, was like being a kid in a candy store. Of course, having little to no experience with some of those media was at times a problem and there are a few pieces I look back on with regret because of my inability to control the material in the way I had hoped. But the total freedom to do whatever I want has been intoxicating. There really is not any one single specific medium I have enjoyed using more than any other. For me, the variety itself is the joy. The freedom. It’s almost subversive, in a way, especially compared to my earlier ways of looking at making art. If I was absolutely pressed to choose one, I would have to say that I have fallen rather hard for using ballpoint pens. The Moby-Dick pieces I’ve completed with ballpoint pen are among my very favorites, and if I do attempt something like illustrating the 72 Demons of the Goetia after this project, I think I might do that all with ballpoint pen. The only drawback is that, again, it is a time consuming medium to attempt, but the results are just breathtakingly beautiful. To me at least.

DK: Since you mentioned favorites, do you have two or three favorite pieces so far? What pieces do you think have been most successful?

MK: I think that too often, artists punk out on this kind of question. They try to act like their pieces are children, and that they couldn’t possibly choose which was a favorite. Not me. There are a few I really really like, far more than the others, although the reasons differ for each. My top five favorites would easily be…

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This one just really came out of the blue for me. Almost perfectly imagined in my own head before I even set pen to paper. This is one of those very rare occasions where the finished image is almost exactly as I had envisioned it, and to me it captures a lot of the majesty, the surrealism, and the power of the novel and of whaling. Perhaps it is because I have never been to sea and never seen a whale, but to me, this is what whaling really is in my head. Vast monsters, leviathans of the deep, duelling to the death with suicidally brave butcher-heroes unafraid of the depths which they move over. For me, it definitely takes on the power of myth.

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The Pequod. The first fully realized image of Melville’s famous ship. Very few people are familiar with Melville’s description of the Pequod and simply imagine it to be the same kind of 19th century ship they’ve seen in Hollywood movies. Melville spends some time describing the worn and ornate look of the ship, how it is tricked out in “the chased bones of her enemies” and “apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor.” Melville even calls her “a cannibal of a craft” and describes her grotesqueness. So, honestly, this ballpoint pen drawing is pretty much exactly what I imagined the Pequod to look like. A savage thing of cruel spikes and chains. High fortress-like hulls, sinister black domes hiding what goes on beneath the deck, and grotesque faces leering out at the beasts of the sea. This one I like very very much.

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Mostly just a chance to depict Hell. But this turned out so well, and I was incredibly pleased with the colors and the shapes and the way that the different paints and inks worked with each other. It reminds me very much of the children’s book illustrations that filled my youth, and the demons and devils of Hell were deliberately depicted in a crude and childish way. I suppose that, in a sense, this is my comment on the clumsy simplicity of Captain Bildad’s Quaker beliefs as well.

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This comes during a very powerful moment in Father Mapple’s sermons, where he alludes to the bottomless grief that the widows and children of whalemen and sailors suffer when their men have “placelessly perished without a grave.” That idea of hurling one’s self into the void of the great oceans of the world, and then dying at sea, perhaps swept overboard by mighty waves and drowned or crushed under the battering timber of a foundering ship or, even worse, devoured whole by one of the mighty leviathans is just deeply terrifying even now. I imagine it was even more powerful, more primal, centuries ago when the sea was even more unknown and more sinister. I think this image perfectly captures that haunting sense of loss and absence. Even the whale is eyeless, featureless, a pale phantom of hunger and mystery.

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In a sense, a photo from Queequeg’s family album. This illustration is the most like what I had been doing artistically prior to this Moby-Dick project, so you can see some of the profusion of detail and obsessive desire to fill up every inch of space. But in this case, I think it worked quite well and I was able to really capture that idea of family, of early photography, and what was sure to be perceived by Americans and westerners as strange island culture. Of course, this one was great fun to draw too.

As for which pieces have been most successful, I think that depends a lot on how “success” is defined. Some have asked me whether I am trying to actually convey the story of Moby-Dick with these illustrations. If my answer to that was “yes,” I suppose the most successful pieces would be those which most effectively communicated information to the viewer. Almost like a comic or a graphic novel. But that was never my intent, and in reality I think that a good familiarity with the novel helps tremendously in getting something out of my illustrations. I don’t think much about what pieces are successful or not, I mostly evaluate each one based on how much I like it. In that sense, the most successful pieces would be those I listed above. But, not to digress again, I am fascinated by this idea of “success” and how it is measured. Especially in this internet era. Would success be measured by hits on a blog? Or comments left? Or would it be measured by which piece sold for the most money? Or which ones communicated the best?

Ultimately I guess it all comes down to me again, and maybe a better answer is WHY do I like the pieces that I like, since that is what makes them, to me, successful. Sometimes I think people might be shocked at how simple I can be, because really, I like the pieces I do because I think they look really cool. I am keenly aware of my limitations as an artist, and while I think I have been able to allude to some of the themes of Melville’s novel in subtle ways with these pieces, I also know that my attempts at symbolism are also generally pretty obvious. I like the background in fine art and in critical studies of literature that might enable me to make these pieces deeper, more sybolic, richer, and more multi-layered. Whether it is my intention or not, what I think will result from this endeavor is a series of illustrations rather than pieces of art. Illustrations depicting how one man sees, in his mind, Melville’s novel Moby-Dick. My visual reading of it, I guess. I know that’s an odd answer, and it might even seem like I sidestepped the issue, but I didn’t. I really think the ones that are the most successful are the ones that are my favorite because they look really good and they are interesting to see and they have some emotional impact. To me, at least.

DK: What, if anything, are you most looking forward to illustrating from the rest of the book?

MK: Whales. No doubt about it. Whales. I have never been very good at illustrating human beings. Not in any way. Even when I was attempting to make comics, my characters were at best serviceable and at worst clumsily rendered and almost embarrassing. But I have long had a childlike fascination with the colossal, the massive, the monstrous, and the unknown. Moby-Dick, both in terms of the titular whale and the surreal nature of the years-long vivid sea voyage hunting the leviathans seems to fire my imagination along those lines more than anything I have ever read or experienced. Perhaps it’s the way that the passage of time has changed modern readers’ perceptions of the book. These days, the idea of setting out to sea for 2 or 3 years in a wooden ship, separated from family and friends, hunting creatures 60 or 70 or 80 feet long with nothing more than a spear and some rope…well, it seems dangerously insane. The purest kind of fiction.

We find ourselves wondering, can such things have really ever occurred? So to me Moby-Dick takes on a kind of surreality. As the narrative draws towards its inevitable conclusion, when page after page after page of wonders and horrors have passed the reader by, we begin to feel as if we are no longer sailing on Earthly seas any longer: that we have made some kind of dream crossing into a world stranger, more primitive, more savage, more symbolic and more mythical than that which those who still walk on the land inhabit. All of these things work together in my head and the whales become not just whales but powers. Something divine yet still terrifyingly violent and deeply serene. I never saw them as just whales, even though whales are incredible things. They became something more, and I was really able to explore that with my illustrations.

If there is ever any chance to work a whale into an illustration, I will find it. Chapter 32, entitled “Cetology,” is one of the more non-fictional chapters in the book, being Ishmael’s attempt to categorize and classify, for the land-bound, the mighty leviathans of the deep. Dividing the whales by size into different books, such as the Folio for the largest, the Octavo for the median-sized, and the Duodecimo for the smallest, Melville (as Ishmael) spends a great deal of time delineating the scientific and literary history of the whales. I love that chapter, and it was something I was looking forward to immediately upon beginning this project because I knew I would be able to illustrate whale after whale after whale in whichever way I wanted.

Moby-Dick himself is a more difficult challenge though. Many of us already have an image of Moby-Dick in our minds-eye, so my illustrations will be challenging those pre-conceived images. Also, Moby-Dick has to be so much more than just another whale, although his nature is deliciously ambiguous. I’ve only illustrated Moby-Dick once so far and although the piece was fairly simple and perhaps a bit straightforward, I am happy with it. It’s a good foundation to build on, and I’m looking forward to visualizing the White Whale in many many different ways.

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