bleakhouse – Page 2 – Gerry Mooney Illustrating Dickens

…And that was the easy part!

As you may know if you have visited my blog before, I’ve now completed a five-year project: illustrating Charles Dickens’ epic novel, BLEAK HOUSE. It was a task of love and devotion, heartbreak, missed connections, long nights, big dreams…and I think that may have been the easy part.

Finding a publisher (which mainly means finding an agent) is no easy task under the best circumstances. Agents have specialized areas of interest and it’s easy but arduous to look them up in the extremely helpful Writers Market. As far as I understand, agents break down into two main areas: literary agents, who assist in matching authors and publishers, and illustrator’s agents, who, due to the present genres in publishing, specialize mainly in children’s books, children’s book illustrators, graphic novels, matching up writers and artists, and putting them together with publishers.

“The Last Picture” Show

As promised in my previous post, I’ve completed a “making of” video of the final large illustration for my BLEAK HOUSE project. It’s not the last chronologically in the book, just the last one to get to. In fact there are two more small, or “spot” illustrations still to do, and those I can do in a few days or a week at most.

The larger ones take more time to work out a more elaborate composition, and can take a month. Shooting a video while doing this work adds a great deal to to process, and of course cutting and editing a video can be time consuming, but I hope the results are worth your time.

A “making of” video in the works

Hi folks, I know it’s been awhile since I’ve posted, and the last post was about a rare but serious creative block. The thing about blocks is, eventually, they just go away and you start plowing back into it.

I’ve been working on this BLEAK HOUSE illustration project non-stop since Spring of 2019. Enormous and all-consuming as it is, I’ve never lost the spark that has moved me so in this sprawling work.

Blocked.

It’s been awhile since I posted here, and the longer I go without posting, the guiltier I feel. I had to think about the reasons for this gap, aside from the usual distractions of life, of which I have at least as many as any other person.

No matter what I may be doing at any given time, there’s always a part of my brain thinking about BLEAK HOUSE, about the next picture, about finishing this project, about NOT finishing this project, and about constantly moving it forward, in big and little ways.

I’ve finished a few new pieces and made good progress, but wasn’t moved to write any posts, as my list of topics had been dwindling. Then things in other areas got busy and BLEAK HOUSE was put aside for awhile. It didn’t last, but when I came back to it I found I was blocked.

Four New Spots

As work proceeds at what sometimes seems like a glacial pace, I would like to present these four recently-completed small illustrations. I’ve strived to provide some context for each with excerpts from the book.

It may seem like there are some spoilers here, but BLEAK HOUSE is so jam-packed with catastrophic plot twists that you’ll forget all about these once you’re reading the book!

VOLUMNIA FINDS LORD DEDLOCK

Here, Lord Dedlock’s flighty cousin Volumnia, a fairly minor character, stumbles upon his prostrate body in the dark.

The Dedlock town house changes not externally, and hours pass before its exalted dullness is disturbed within. But Volumnia the fair, being subject to the prevalent complaint of boredom and finding that disorder attacking her spirits with some virulence, ventures at length to repair to the library for change of scene. Her gentle tapping at the door producing no response, she opens it and peeps in; seeing no one there, takes possession.

Elon Musk, The Wall Street Journal, and me

On October 3, I got an email from Ellen Gamerman, an arts writer for the Wall Street Journal. Elon Musk was in the process of being sued by Twitter for backing out of his offer to purchase the social media giant. No news there, right? So I get this email:

Hi Gerry,
I’m an arts writer with the WSJ, and I’m working on a story about Bleak House and the chancery court, pegged to the start of Elon Musk’s trial in a (very different) chancery court. I hoped to talk with you because I saw on the Dickens Society site that you were interested in illustrating that novel. It would be great to hear your thoughts about the visuals in Dickens’s chancery court. If you’re free, I’m on a tight deadline and hoped to reach you today if possible, or tomorrow. Thank you!
Best,
Ellen

Inspector Bucket

It has been said that Inspector Bucket, the police detective in BLEAK HOUSE, was the very first fictional detective, pre-dating Sherlock Holmes among others. I don’t know about that, but I do love this great Dickens character!

It’s tempting to compare him to others of the genre, and I often think of Columbo for some reason, but that’s not even close. Bucket is not rumpled and never feigns confusion, but the attribute they share is a totally disarming likability. Bucket’s greatest skill as an investigator is instantly being everyone’s best friend and confidante. He can speak to little children, Lords and Ladies, or street sweepers, and within a sentence or two bond with them like an old friend.

Charles Dickens and Race

You may know that I was extremely honored earlier this year to be asked to write a blog post for the prestigious Dickens Society in London. It was well-received and there is a standing invitation to write more for them in the future.

The Dickens Society is an academic group dedicated to exploring all facets of Charles Dickens’s* life and work, but it is not an exclusive club at all. In fact I was surprised to learn how easy it is to join: by subscribing to their journal The Dickens Quarterly, you are automatically enrolled as a member.

It is The Dickens Quarterly that I would like to write about. I’ve been a member for a year now, and I am by no means either a Dickens completist, or an academic of any kind. Some of the material is a little over my head, but I’m comfortable with that. What is great is the breadth of subject matter, and how it makes you think differently not only about Dickens but also about nineteenth-century fiction, Victorian England, and much more.

“Spot Illos”

So in doing magazine and book illustration for a few decades, I picked up a couple of technical terms. For example, an illustration is called an “illo”, a sketch is called a “ruff”, and a deadline is called a “#!!@! deadline”.

Illos done for print are termed by their size, and from biggest to smallest are called a spread, full-page, half-page, quarter page, and spot. Spots are fun because they are usually simple, a quick visual read, and they don’t necessarily have to carry as much narrative weight as a full-page does.

Free Ebook Download!

This fully illustrated ebook contains the first seven chapters.

I’m extremely happy to announce the completion of the next step in this monumental project: A free, no-strings-attached ebook download of the first seven chapters of Charles Dickens’ great BLEAK HOUSE.

This is intended primarily as a calling card and proof-of-concept for my ultimate goal, a hard cover print edition of the entire illustrated novel.

As you may have discovered, I am smitten with this book. I began work on it in the Spring of 2019 and have been working on it nonstop since. With the completion of this sample, I will be continuing work on the monumental, 57-chapter novel, as well as continuing to post here on a regular basis.

This ebook in pdf format can be read on any computer, device or reader. There’s no sign-up, no email harvesting, no obligation of any kind. I hope you enjoy it.

BleakHouse_Dickens_Mooney Download