The Ghost Pirates
- THE GHOST PIRATES - A computer painting. It a ppears in the book, "Masters of the Weird Tale: Hodgson," published by Centipede Press in 2009.
To do this picture I used my computer to clip and paste sections of a painting that I did for an art folio, "Nightmares in Blood," and added some new material to the foreground. The odd thing about this illustration is that it shows a scene beneath the sea that is not described in the story. Once in a while I take an "imagined" part of a story to illustrate, one that is not actually described by the writer, hoping to add to the reader's experience instead of just rendering the images the author has written about.
When I read a story, images form in my mind not only by the words created by the author, they also activate my own Knowledge of the subject, my experience with it, and my own imagination. When anyone reads a story there is a linking of minds between the reader and the writer. Sometimes the union results in a rewarding reading experience , and sometimes it doesn't because the two minds are simply not sympatico.
As an illustrator I can run into problems if my mind cannot "connect" with the writer's work. However, with Hodgson's story, "The Ghost Pirates," there was no such problem, I was overwhelmed with images I thought would make great scenes. I made a ton of notes in the margins of the manuscript as I read the story, so it's surprising that after I finished reading it, and after going over all my notes, I actually decided to do this scene, an "implied" happening, which is not actually described in the novel. How odd is that!
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