Memoirs of a Geisha

OK - so I have only seen the film - but I had a Geisha kicking around, so I put her to good use. 

Ta Daa.

THE HANDMAIDS TALE

                                       

I like science fiction but I don't tend to like science fiction writers. I wish 

Atwood was still about writing bonkers dis-topian nightmares like this though. The scariest thing about the entire book are the silences and a sense of unbearable tension that makes you want to burst. The cover above shows a scene in which the protagonist nun/slave has taken a walk to a wall where the regime hang dead political enemies on hooks. Just like the silences, it is the absence of these bodies that makes the cover sinister.

My cover is a little less sinister. a lot less actually. Bah. 

 I did not know their was a film. I'm told it is terrible. Terribly good? Look at those nuns! 

Dracula - !!

The above Dracula cover for the Sun Dial Library is a little classic I think. 

The version below was requested for a friends play. 

We all know about this book....

But the Sun Dial Library take on the fanged one seems so much more poised and pleasant than the usual hammer horrors. As if he would be great company up until a point. Ha.  

It was much fun.

 

Illywhacker

If western Europe is a room full of old learned men with bushy eyebrows and white beards down to their knees pottering over vast ledgers of achievement, Peter Carey would have us believe that Australia is a cocky prepubescent with a Polaroid camera, a fertile imagination and a tendency to fib. Or at least that is how the narrator - one Herbert Badgery; aviator, car salesman, disappearing act, obsessive builder and creator of dragons (yes, dragons!) - tells it. My drawing, like the example to the left, features a Parrot - a black Cockatoo to be precise.  

My portrait for Rasori Electrique's Busca qui t'ha pegat, a spanish novel that unfortunately I am unable to read. 

A Doll's House

I read this at school. Mostly I remember the play when we went to see it. Of the book I mainly remember making jokes about Krogstad "comming in the back passage" and Nora obbsessing over her fur hand-warmer  "brush my muff". Yes, we were 15.   I drew the doll recently in a puppet museum in Munich and coloured it at home. The full version of the drawing is available via my other page - www.tomwalkerart.blogspot.com 

"From now on, forget happiness. Now it’s just about saving the remains, the wreckage, the appearance." - Ibsen

Cloud Atlas

                                                           

                                                                    

This book is an incredibly clever thing. Lots of characters from past present and future. All terribly different but all linked by a comet shaped birth mark. It boomerangs through time and leaves you wishing each character had their own War and Peace scale novel all to themselves. The cover I drew for it is inspired by a scene set far in the future, in which an artificially generated waitress steps outside her employers walls for the first time in her life.

"Overwhelming: the apposite word. Outside's many flavoured air; fumes, kim-chee, sewage, consumers bodies. A running consumer missed me by an inch, "Watch out, clone!" She had gone before i could apologise. My hair was mussed by the breath of a giant, invisible aircon" - David Mitchell.