ART & ILLUSTRATION

selections from the book MOBY-DICK IN PICTURES: ONE DRAWING FOR EVERY PAGE [2009 - 2011]
page 003 : It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all. page 020 : Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal head-peddler. page 030 : Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas—entire strangers to them—and duelled them dead without winking... page 053 : His father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable warriors. page 066 : ...take my word for it, you never saw such a rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old fashioned claw-footed look about her. page 075 : 'Thou Bildad!' roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the cabin. 'Blast ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in these matters, I would afore now had a conscience to lug about that would be heavy enough to founder the largest ship that ever sailed round Cape Horn.' page 076 : 'Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing, ye insult me. It's an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature that he's bound to hell. Flukes and flames!' page 108 : The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man... page 109 : 'I will have no man in my boat,' said Starbuck, 'who is not afraid of a whale.' page 117 : Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.
page 127 : As yet, however, the Sperm Whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life. page 131 : The Fin-Back is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. Very shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the remotest and most sullen waters... page 132 : BOOK I (Folio), chapter IV (Hump Back). page 172 : ...a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped them... page 176 : The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden gleamings. page 218 : Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together... page 222 : ...the pursuit of whales is always under great and extraordinary difficulties... page 230 : Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there was promise in the voyage. page 254 : It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong. page 259 : For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like.
page 266 : As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea. page 270 : For though other species of whales find their food above water, and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones below the surface; and only by inference is it that any one can tell of what, precisely, that food consists. page 284 : Nor was that Stubb the only banqueter on whale's flesh that night. Mingling their mumblings with his own mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead Leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. page 297 : In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. page 320 : Far back on the side of the head, and low down, near the angle of either whale's jaw, if you narrowly search, you will at last see a lashless eye, which you would fancy to be a young colt's eye; so out of all proportion is it to the magnitude of the head. page 333 : Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after the slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made side lunges near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards, and so hauled out our poor Tash by the head. page 341 : Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a huge, humped old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed afflicted with the jaundice, or some other infirmity. page 348 : It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade, the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh, on the lower part of the bunch before described. page 357 : Instead of sparkling water, he now spouts red blood. page 359 : This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon rising to the surface, the Sperm Whale will continue there for a period of time exactly uniform with all his other unmolested risings. Say he stays eleven minutes, and jets seventy times, that is, respires seventy breaths; then whenever he rises again, he will be sure to have his seventy breaths over again, to a minute. Now, if after he fetches a few breaths you alarm him, that he sounds, he will be always dodging up again to make good his regular allowance of air. And not till those seventy breaths are told, will he finally go down to stay out his full term below.
page 362 : He is both ponderous and profound. page 369 : Hence it is, that, while other ships may have gone to China from New York, and back again, touching at a score of ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted one grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating seamen like themselves. So that did you carry them the news that another flood had come; they would only answer - 'Well, boys, here's the ark!' page 374 : ...then, with the tapering force of his parting momentum, we glided between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal... page 402 : Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. page 424 : '...the whale's tail looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble steeple.' page 427 : 'But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He's all a magnet!' page 443 : For Pliny tells us of whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and Aldrovandus of others which measured eight hundred feet in length... page 457 : 'What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth saving, Sir.' 'So it is, so it is; if we get it.' page 464 : So, in good time my Queequeg gained strength; and at length after sitting on the windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with a vigorous appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out arms and legs, gave himself a good stretching, yawned a little bit, and then springing into the head of his hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon, pronounced himself fit for a fight. page 470 : At last the shank, in one complete rod, received its final heat; and as Perth, to temper it, plunged it all hissing into the cask of water near by, the scalding steam shot up into Ahab's bent face.
page 476 : It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the crimson fight were done : and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun and whale both stilly died together... page 477 : For that strange spectacle observable in all Sperm Whales dying - the turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring - that strange spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to Ahab conveyed a wondrousness unknown before. page 484 : 'Look aloft!' cried Starbuck. 'The St. Elmo's Lights (corpus sancti) corposants! the corposants!' All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar. page 486 : 'Aye, aye, men!' cried Ahab. 'Look up at it; mark it well; the white flame but lights the way to the White Whale!' page 520 : '...forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep!' page 533 : 'Aye, aye!' cried Stubb, 'I knew it - ye can't escape - blow on and split your spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your trump - blister your lungs! - Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller shuts his water-gate upon the stream!' page 534 : ...Moby Dick bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance. page 538 : 'Great God! but for one single instant show thyself, page 546 : ...Moby Dick was now again steadily swimming forward... page 548 : Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution, catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it - it may be - a larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.



SOLAR BROTHERS [2009 - 2011]
Solar Brother #01 Solar Brother #02 Solar Brother #03 Solar Brother #04 Solar Brother #06 Solar Brother #07 Solar Brother #08 Solar Brother #10 Solar Brother #11 Solar Brother #14
Solar Brother #17 Solar Brother #18 Solar Brother #21 Solar Brother #32 Solar Brother #37 Solar Brother #38 Solar Brother #39 Solar Brother #41 Solar Brother #42 Solar Brother #48



ROBOT MASTERS [2008 - 2009]
Bolt Man Combustion Man Flying Snail Head Man Eat Man Brass Man Devil Skull Man Polychromatic Pontification Man Split Fountain Man



STRANGE SATELLITES [2005 - 2007]
Otis and His Brother Caleb, the Pillbug Satellites Heliotrope Fulgurator Flying-Not-Swimming, the Effervescent Satellite The Mellifluous Pulse Nuages (That Which Passes, Passes Like Clouds) The Grinning Psychopomp The Dirac Sea Satellite The Staring Thunder King Circle



FIRST ARCHONS [1998 - 2006]
Metatron - 'I Am He' A Power of the Air Giant Jade Emperor Baraqiel, the Lightning of God Watchers An Angel of the Throne Spring H'Xoi, Emperor of the Celestial Ponds The Lux Aeterna, Auriomn


art © Matt Kish