linocut – Page 2 – Gerry Mooney Illustrating Dickens

Inspector Bucket Superstar

You may have ended up here in response to my latest email announcement, all nice and formatted with images and new info. I’ve been wanting to make this improvement for some time and I’m happy with the results. Above all, it contains an “opt-out” option at the bottom which is just polite, but I never had the means to do it in a standard, email-friendly format.

It means a lot to have the support I’ve gotten from many friends and even strangers in this journey. The book is out in the wild, I’ve gotten my first press coverage in our hometown Claremore Progress, and I’ve lined up my first book signing.

Okay, It’s ON!

Well folks, I first want to thank you for stopping by to read my posts here. It’s been a labor of love even when it’s a struggle because this book and this project are something I believe in. I don’t think I would have stuck to all this if it weren’t!

So I would like to announce the following:
BLEAK HOUSE, by Charles Dickens and illustrated with 40 new linoleum prints by Gerry Mooney, is now available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DTG8DLCJ . Paperback, 650 pages, $30. I’m not planning an e-book edition.

How “A Christmas Carol” Ends

Man, I really didn’t want to write this post. I had big plans, as I wrote about in my post of Sept. 10. Create a set of charming scenes from Charles Dickens’s holiday classic as three-color linoleum prints, and do it in time to sell them for this Christmas season in my Etsy shop, which I set up primarily to try selling some of my BLEAK HOUSE prints. Ambitious but doable, I thought.

It actually started out very well. I developed my sketches into imagery that I was very happy with. I enjoyed designing the lettering with a loose but classical sort of letterform, and of course thinking about and drawing the characters was a lot of fun. I was making good progress! The key factor was time, since I was starting maybe a little late for the holidays, due to the complexity and somewhat experimental nature of the project.

A Christmas Carol

I recently started an Etsy shop (since closed!) to offer prints of a couple of my BLEAK HOUSE illustrations. I’ve done a soft launch but the fact is my offerings so far are pretty slim. I know a couple of images I’ve done for this project have a broader appeal, but growing a shop like this based on what I’ve done for this one book has some problems. So as I said, a soft launch just to get some feedback, but it is certainly off to a slow start. It would be nice to have something special to offer for Christmas.

I love “A Christmas Carol” as much as anyone, but mostly the movies (Mr. Magoo is my favorite!). I hadn’t read the text for a long time, but recently I read it again as a way to refresh my Dickens knowledge. I pretty quickly felt moved to do some sketching, in a way that movies do not inspire me. Interesting!

…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.

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.

Gustave Doré – Jan. 6, 1832-Jan. 23, 1883

In researching and reading about the art and business of woodcut illustration in the 19th Century, it is almost inevitable to end up with Gustave Doré. More than a master draftsman or illustrator, he possessed a practically supernatural ability to simply draw. He was recognized as a prodigy at age five, was carving in stone at twelve, and by fifteen he was supporting his family by drawing caricatures for French magazine Le journal pour rire.

Although Dickens and Doré never met as far as I can determine, their lifespans overlapped, Dickens being born in 1812 and Doré in 1832. And while Dickens labored in the world of British popular fiction and monthly magazines, the French Doré was producing high-quality illustrated art volumes of what we would call “The Great Books”, e.g., Voltaire, Rabelais, Cervantes, the Bible, Paradise Lost, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and many, many others, much of it for a British audience.

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.