Illustrating Moby-Dick One Page at a Time

By Jason Boog 

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Since August, artist Matt Kish has worked his way page-by-page through Herman Melville’s Moby Dick–illustrating each page along the way.

Page 109 is pictured above, a painting entitled: “I will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.” Inspired by artist Zak Smith‘s project to create one illustration for every page of Thomas Pynchon’s epic Gravity’s Rainbow, he tackled the mother of all modern novels. Fiction Circus passed a long the link to this obsessive project.

Here’s more from the site: “I would do one piece a day, every day, until I was done. And I have a full time job too. And a wife. And a life. For me, that kind of pace was almost inconceivable. I decided to just do whatever I wanted with the art, even if it looked crude or raw. After all, I had no one to please or disappoint but myself. Impulsively, I grabbed the first paperback edition of Moby-Dick I could find, which turned out to be the Signet Classic edition from 1992 with 552 pages. Looking back, maybe I should have thought things through a bit more since I’ve seen quite a few editions with around 400 pages, which would have saved me an awful lot of time.”