Cover Design for My Women My Monsters

 

The last task for the completion of my chapbook of poetry, My Women/My Monsters, was finished a few days ago - a picture for the cover. This concludes work that was begun in 2012 and went through various permutations, including a one-woman show at the local university art gallery.

Each poem in the book is illustrated by a meticulously rendered black and white pencil drawing. My publisher thought to use one of these illustrations for the book cover. We narrowed this down to two choices. I liked one of these choices - the half self portrait I made with my fingers reaching around my eye to grab a pencil. There are, of course, many allusions here. The swan neck deformities in my fingers allude to the connective tissue monster of Ehlers-Danlos. The fingers circumscribe my left eye. The left is the one with the color deficit, hence the illustrations are in black and white.

Yet even though black and white is the theme of the book and would therefore make for an appropriate cover, I mentioned to my publisher that a color cover would be more engaging and that I would try to do our favorite illustration over again as a color painting.  I knew that I would have to keep checking my progress with my "better" right eye but I felt that I would be up to the challenge.
It would have been boring to make an exact copy of the original black and white illustration so I decided to embellish a bit. For one thing, a simple portrait alone would not be quite so monstrous. As monsters was the theme in this book I decided to use the arm from the illustration of Tomb Guardians and paint that on to the turned palm of the hand. Everything now dovetails rather nicely. The pencil guides the eye which creates the vision and the inner monsters grows on to the hand.