For our final interview from the Kitsune Noir Poster Club we have Garrett Vander Leun, a Los Angeles based illustrator who chose The Road for his poster. Garrett has been drawing since he was a little kid, influenced by his father’s illustrations and comic books growing up. Garrett’s artwork has been featured on music packaging and t-shirts and he is currently working on several series of portraits.

Why did you choose The Road?
The book hit me very hard when I read it, unlike any book has before or since.
I would be remiss if I didn’t say I’ve had some amazing women in my life, and both my mother and grandmother have had a profound influence on me – but there’s something about the relationship between father and son that is almost indescribable, a kind of shorthand where words are often exercised in light of an unspoken understanding. That bond, and that relationship, is so strong in this book and it reminded me very much of the relationship I have with my father. Even without the father thing, the parental instinct in this novel, the need to blindly do anything for your child’s well-being, has never been captured so elegantly and pure. These two characters live in spite of their grim surroundings, live only for each other really, for as the book progresses you’re overwhelmed by hopelessness and despair. At one point, the boy talks with his father:

What would you do if I died?

If you died, I would want to die too.

So you could be with me?

Yes, so I could be with you.

Okay.

That’s it right there, the subtext of the entire book. Two people trying to survive in spite of the ever-changing times, a world where love and kindness is endangered, if not already extinct. Cormac McCarthy is a modern master, and the beauty of his words are very subtle, they’re all just-so deliberate and perfect. No quotation marks, no dialogue modifiers, no excessive flourishes of any kind. It’s like a novelized poem or something. Cormac McCarthy operates on this other level – he reminds me of Terrence Malick, the filmmaker, in a lot of ways.

What did you choose the images in the poster to represent the novel?
I know it looks as though I simply illustrated a scene from the book. You could make a damn good case for it, especially because I site a specific passage on the Society 6 page. Even so, I feel like the image speaks for the entire novel. A father and son against the world. Cormac McCarthy writes a world where every glimmer of light is overshadowed by the evils that befall man in moments of weakness or hardships. Certainly this cannibal with the knife exemplifies that. As you read the book, there’s this cloud of dread that hangs over everything, just this incredible darkness. It’s such a heavy, heavy read. McCarthy paints such a grim picture of the world, and the one image I always saw so vividly was the sky grey and dark, filled with smoke from the constant, steady fires across the horizon. There’s not a moment where the sun breaks through, it’s just rain and fire.

What was the process of making the poster like?
Insane. Absolutely insane. This poster became the focal point of my bid to take myself seriously as an artist. I’m guilty of taking shortcuts in a lot of my work, skipping a forth or fifth pass on something in favor of getting it done and moving onto the next big thing – it’s always GO GO GO with me. I’m not trying to cheat anyone, it’s just a compulsion I have to always want to work on my next project. It’s an easy habit to succumb to when all you’re doing essentially, you know, is putting your art on the fridge, the lay person’s art gallery. All you get is a “wow, that’s really cool!” over and over from the average person, but as an artist? To fellow artist? You can smell bullshit a mile away, and mine stinks. Putting this poster up for sale and on your blog was going to be the biggest “fridge” I’d ever encountered, and I decided to go all-in. The book mattered, the project mattered, and so too does my career going forward.

Instead of combing the internet or my books for references photos that kind-of-sort-of worked, I put on costumes and took photos of myself in my room. They don’t match perfectly with the final product, but I wouldn’t want them too anyways. What was important was the intent, the emotion when I did it. I wanted to feel my painting the same way I felt the book. I did so many color layers on the Father and the Son and the Cannibal. Stuff you can’t even see any more, it makes me laugh thinking about all the “invisible time” on this thing. I pretty much painted the clothing new and then over the course of several sessions, beat them to hell, covered them with all dirt and grime needed to honor the images that Cormac invoked. That being said, with all the effort I put in, there’s still a few little things that bother me, but I suppose we’re all our own worst enemy. I look at the company I’m in on this project, and it’s violently humbling. One of the things I’ve come to realize is that all artists with any sort of schooling can jump through the hoops. We can all do a still life, you know? It’s what you do from there that really matters. Where do you take all those basics? I think as long as you do it whole-heartedly, you commit to what you’re doing and you respect it, you’re going to land somewhere in that broad spectrum of “good art” by default. I think. I hope. It’s like Stephen King says in his book On Writing, “Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.” In the end, I’m just happy I can look back at this piece and know I went to this blank page very, very heavy.

Thanks again my friend, this is beautiful stuff.
To purchase Garrett’s print click here.

Continuing our series of interviews with the artists behind the first series of the Kitsune Noir Poster Club I’d like to present a fellow named Cody Hoyt. Cody grew up in Florida, studied printmaking at the Massachusetts College of Art, and now lives in Los Angeles. I don’t remember how I came across Cody’s work but about a year and a half ago I asked him to create a desktop wallpaper and he obliged. Since then I’ve been absolutely in love with his work. It still boggles my mind that Cody isn’t a super famous artist, I tell him this all the time, and his Infinite Jest poster further proves this.

To give a little background, Infinite Jest is a book by the recently deceased David Foster Wallace that was written in 1996. If you haven’t heard of it you should have, because Time magazine put the book in it’s list of best English-language novels from 1923 to the present. Wikipedia sums up the book nicely as being about “tennis, substance addiction and recovery programs, depression, child abuse, family relationships, advertising and popular entertainment, film theory, and Quebec separatism.” So you see, it’s a chaotic book about a lot of stuff, and Cody nailed it on the head.

Why did you choose Infinite Jest?
I made a short list of potential candidates. I had originally chosen A Scanner Darkly by Phillip K. Dick, which was a tragic mind-fuck of a book. Infinite Jest was my second choice, but should have been my first, because its absolutely perfect. Its also a tragic mind-fuck, but more so, and hasn’t been made into a movie starring Keanu Reeves yet. Its an epic, dark and touching jackpot of cinematic imagery.

Why did you choose the images in the poster to represent the novel?
The process started with rereading as much of the 1,088 (or whatever) page book as I could to reacquaint myself. I made a few lists and used a lot of tiny post-its and bookmarks. Once I had a rich supply of ideas and themes, I went bananas and drew everything. I scanned all of it and assembled it in Adobe Photoshop. The final image is a result of constantly rotating in my chair between two desks- one for drawing and one for scanning.

The central skull-face is the character James Incandenza, a patriarchal figure who commits suicide by modifying a microwave oven to cook his own head. I took the moment of head-microwaving to create an environment that could reflect how the text is more or less a huge shit-storm of information and ideas. Intense, grandiose, and challenging but hopefully beautiful and exciting too.

According to Wallace, he structured the book as a “lopsided Sierpinski gasket.” I would love to see someone translate the book into an organized visual aid, like some kind of monstrous flow chart or diagram, or something. I opted to do the opposite and focused on the emotional components to get something visceral and raw.

The pieces of text combine to read “I think of John (No Relation) Wayne, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father’s head.” One of my favorite lines in the novel. Also a kind of lynch-pin for the entire narrative scope of the novel. (Hidden in plain sight, right in the beginning of the book, before you have any context for it to mean anything.)

Do you remember the first time you read the book?
In 2003 or ’04, a friend of mine who was more or less a literary genius told me he was “reading the most ridiculous and mind-numbingly awesome book” he’d ever read. Good enough for me, so I borrowed it from the library. I was living in Boston at the time, where a large portion of the book takes place, and that played a crucial role in how I experienced reading it.

What’s your favorite part of the book?
The meta part that doesn’t actually exist in the book. Also, trying to figure out what happened. Solving mysteries. Example: Was his toothbrush dosed with a highly potent psychedelic drug, or did his own gastro-intestinal system organically produce it from a mold he consumed as a toddler? Who knows?

Cody you’re a genius, please make more art for me all the time.
To purchase Cody’s print click here.

Bobby

When dreaming up the Kitsune Noir Poster Club I sincerely hoped that someone would do Moby Dick. When I think of classic novels, like the really old ones that everyone borrows from, it’s at the top of my list. So when Mark Weaver chose it I was really excited. If you don’t know, Mark is an illustrator/designer who lives in Atlanta, Georgia and is one of my absolute favorites. I’ve been following Mark’s work since earlier this year and I loved what he did with collages. Anyone can cut images out of old National Geographics but not everyone can make it look like a work of art.

Why did you choose Moby Dick?
When I was a kid books like Moby Dick and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea captivated my imagination. Growing up in Massachusetts around small seaport towns like Gloucester, I was surrounded by all kinds of nautical imagery which brought the stories to life for me. I’ve always loved the idea of sea monsters or something fearful out in the deep depths of the ocean. When this project was assigned to me I immediately thought of the White Whale.

Why did you choose the images in the poster to represent the novel?
Any illustration for Moby Dick wouldn’t be complete without Moby Dick himself. I wanted to distort the scale relationship between the whale and the ship to illustrate the weight of Ahab’s obsession. Originally the whale was much smaller than it is in the final poster. The purpose of the grid was to create an abstract representation of the division between the surface of the water and the sky. “REVENGE” being one of the major themes of the book, seemed to fit really well because of the content in the piece.

Do you remember the first time you read the book?
The first time I became familiar with the book was when my parents bought us kids a set of little classic illustrated books. Recently I discovered them in my parent’s basement which brought back some great memories. The first time I read the original novel was in high school for an American Lit. class.

What’s your favorite part of the book?
Definitely the last few chapters where they chase the whale for 3 days and Ahab inevitably meets his doom. The illustration is loosely based on this portion from the last chapter:

“From the ship’s bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.”

Thanks again for making my dreams come true Mark!
To purchase Mark’s print click here.

For our second round of interviews we’re talking to British gentleman Jez Burrows about his poster for the book Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Jez has a very simplistic, but bold and graphic style that he employs, making the most of as little as possible. He’s worked for clients such as The New York Times, Time, Wired and Monocle to name a few.

Here’s what he had to say about his poster.

Why did you choose Walden?
I couldn’t choose one absolute favourite novel, so I narrowed it down to a shortlist. I’d initially attempted to do something on Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but quickly discovered I was losing my mind and was seeing too many cats and soldiers in my dreams.
Walden appeals to me because while it’s certainly a book about society, self-reliance, and solitude (besides a hundred other things), the setting fascinates me. I’m originally from a very rural area in the south west of England, and there’s something remarkable about taking your thoughts to the woods.

What did you choose the images in the poster to represent the novel?
There are certainly enormous, complex ideas in Thoreau’s writing, but to deal with them explicitly felt incongruous with another dominant theme of the book: simplicity. I love how forested areas are typically represented in maps with miniature pictograms, so I took those as a starting point and developed an entire wood. I wanted to stress the solitude and enormity of the surroundings, but also hint at something special happening inside them.

Do you remember the first time you read the book?
It was actually quite recent, only August 2008. I was sat on the top bunk of a bed in a Stockholm hostel, stuck inside as the weather was aggressively bad. I love any book that demands you meet it as its own pace, and Walden does that. I’m yet to read it in an actual forest, but I’m planning to do so when I head home for the holidays.

What’s your favorite part of the book?
I can’t hope to articulate why, but the fifth chapter, Solitude, is certainly one of my favourites. Thoreau talks about sheltering from rainstorms, about darkness and mythology, but also completely questions our basis for understanding solitude. It is remarkable.

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can “see the folks,” and recreate, and as he thinks remunerate himself for his day’s solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and “the blues”; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it.”

Thanks again Jez!
To pick up Jez’s poster of Walden please click here.

Bobby

As a part of the Kitsune Noir Poster Club I wanted to give you an inside look at the process behind the posters. First up is Frank Chimero, the Springfield, Missouri based illustrator who’s been really blowing up lately. Frank has worked for clients like The New York Times, Nike, Starbucks, GOOD Magazine and ton more. He’s one of my favorite artist/designers around these days and I was stoked when he agreed to take part in the club. For Frank’s poster he decided to choose Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut.

Why did you choose Slaughterhouse 5?
It represents something to me. So far as I can tell, it’s really the first book I found, read, and then chose to like on my own accord. It was mine. I owned it and the experience of reading it and how it made me feel. I did this when I was 12 or so, and it holds a special place with me, because it represents the process I went through of trying to understand who I was. The book is perennial for me. I’ve read it two other times since that first time, and it still has that an impact on me. It’s aged with me. Each time I read it, I connect to it in a different way. The first time, it was about aliens and pretty girls on other planets and time travel. Now, the book is more about what’s it’s like to try to capture things in a piece of art even though they fight their hardest to defy your efforts. It’s about how words fail. It’s about how people fail. It’s about how fruitless the world can seem some times. And it’s about how maybe, just maybe, Billy Pilgrim’s naivety saved him.

Why did you choose the images in the poster to represent in the novel?
The prison is obviously that. It’s containment for Billy Pilgrim. He can escape by changing his place in time, hence the silhouette being warped backwards outside of the ball. Then, there’s the eye. That’s, obviously, about seeing. Billy Pilgrim’s life was saved by not being seen. And then, his other life with the Trafalmadores is about being observed and being intensely seen. Billy Pilgrim’s an optometrist, and I can’t help but feel that Vonnegut’s symbolism there is to use Billy Pilgrim as a device to show how he believes one with proper vision should see the world. Things happen that don’t make sense. Wars are waged. People die. It’s tragic, but so it goes. It’s a cold message. The background is largely blues and whites and noisy and dirty. I wanted to make a wasteland. I wanted to make a cold, lifeless city after a fire bombing. I wanted to make a ski slope after a plane crash. The poster is disjointed. The top is the bottom, the bottom is the top. Things are backwards. Things are fragmented. The design is unstuck in time, just like Billy.

What was the process of making the poster like?
Arduous. Hard. Difficult. Like everything, it took three times longer than I thought to finish. It’s a hard book to summarize visually, because there is so much going on. There’s so many messages in so few pages.

Who knew that making an image to represent an existential, non-linear science fiction novel about an intergalactic specimen and prisoner of war would be difficult? Who thought that fitting space and war and four-dimensional beings into one picture would take some time? I didn’t. Honestly, I didn’t even think my choice through very much, and had an “Oh god, what am I going to do?” moment the first time I sat down to work on it.

So, I started by doing what I always do. I reread the book. Then, I mapped things out for myself, looking for themes and ideas and illogical connections that somehow work. I just start with associations and lay everything out on the table to see what I can work with.

My first idea was to hone in on the writing aspect. It called to me for some reason: Kurt Vonnegut opens the book by writing about writing the book. Kilgore Trout is a writer. Billy Pilgrim is writing in the book too. It’s a book about a lot of things, but one of them is the process of making something that refuses to get on the page in the right way. I know that feeling. Oh man, do I know that feeling.

The first sentence is “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” Can I make the cover come unstuck in time? How about the title? And Vonnegut’s name? I wanted a sense of tangibility and roughness to it, so I decided to borrow a friend’s typewriter and start fooling around with options of how I can play with type. How does a title that’s unstuck in time look?

With a bit of modification, I was really happy with the idea. It didn’t even have to have any visual reference to events in the book. It was snow and it was rough and it was out of order. It was up to the viewer to put the pieces together to figure out the meaning. Isn’t that really what the book was? Just a set of disjointed, out of order vignettes in which someone could construct a larger meaning?

Or did it even have to be that complicated? Maybe it just needs to be… meaningless.

I had been fighting and wrestling with ideas that were difficult to summarize. I sent these out for you to take a gander at and got some really nice feedback. Basically “Go more visual.” Though these ideas might work well as a book cover, they’re certainly not posters. Maybe what I needed to do was back track to my mind map and look for other themes. I think I hit the bullseye with these concepts, but it was the wrong target.

I looked closer. I found some other themes that were interesting. Vision and perception. Entrapment versus freedom. Fracturedness and suffering and barrenness. So, i started thinking of ways to visually interpret that. Below is a series of images that roughly go through the changes from the initial visual idea to the final.

What’s your favorite part of the book?
To be honest, I intensely love the parts of the book that are about writing the book. It operates on such a meta level, but it’s so satisfying. It sets up the book as a flawed story with flawed characters, written by a flawed man in a flawed way. It sets your expectations immediately, and there’s a sense of honesty in that, whether the occurrences at the beginning of the book actually happened or not. It’s Vonnegut dancing a dance for 30 pages that only he can do. It’s engrossing.

And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their houses had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to anymore.

I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.

This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.

Thanks for the interview Frank, you did an awesome job.
To purchase Frank’s print click here.

Bobby

Over the last 7 months this blog has become my life and career. Making the blog as enjoyable and informative as possible has been my main goal, but I’ve had a lot of opportunities open up to me that have made me realize I can do more. I’ll be expanding the scope of Kitsune Noir, creating new projects that will slowly start to manifest themselves over the next few months.

For now though, I’m happy to introduce the Kitsune Noir Poster Club which I’ve teamed up with Society6 to create. The KN/PC is a way for me to be a part of something that not only promotes art but positions Kitsune Noir as something more than just a blog. For this first round of posters I’ve asked five of my favorite artists to interpret books they really enjoy into a print that will be a lasting work of art. The first collection of poster artists include Frank Chimero, Mark Weaver, Jez Burrows, Cody Hoyt and Garrett Vander Leun.

The prints come in three different sizes:
17″ X 23″ / $50
22″ X 28″ / $55
28″ X 40″ / $70

They’re all gallery quality Giclée prints on bright white, matte, smooth surface, 100% cotton rag, acid and lignin free archival paper printed using Epson K3 archival inks and then custom trimmed with 2″ border. Fancy stuff, right?

I’ll also be running interviews with each other artists throughout the week starting with Frank Chimero later today. He’ll be talking about his process in creating his poster, which trust me, was a lot of work and is truly fascinating. I’ve admired his work for a while now but it’s truly awesome to see how far he dives into his work.

I hope you enjoy the prints and if you’d like to order one click any of the posters below. Any of these would make wonderful presents for the holidays. This is only the first poster series with many more to come, so get ready for more beautiful art.

Bobby