In this session we looked at a chapter from Herman Melville’s book ‘Moby Dick’ titled ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’. In preparation for this workshop I researched the text to get a sense of its themes and ideas. Also I wrote down some key quotes, all of this research can be seen below:
I did some visual research of the text to see what illustrations have been made previously to get inspiration for my own work. Here is a selection of images I collected:
This page explains the workshop activity:
Here are some notes I made about themes and ideas that I noticed during our class readings of the extract, including jewels, innocence and nature:
After reading the text and making notes about the themes and ideas we went around the campus and collected visual media that we felt linked to the text. One obvious theme to keep in mind was the colour white so the majority of the things I collected were white. I wanted to at least have most of the images in greyscale as I thought colour would distract from the themes and not really represent the text. I also explored other themes such as people, nature and jewels. When collecting the visual media I had these themes in mind but I also just collected things that I thought were interesting whether that be in shape/form, texture or pattern.
After the session I created 2 collages using the images that I collected. I enjoy creating digital collages and found it a good exercise to really think about what I had collected and how I could combine them into compositions. I wanted to have the themes and ideas of the text present but not be an obvious depiction/ illustration of it. Working more abstractly is not something I do often so I wanted to explore that as it’s something I felt I could improve on from the last workshop. I think the full greyscale compositions are interesting as the details hide themselves so when you look at it your eyes aren’t immediately draw in by colour so you have to take a closer look to see all the different elements.
Overall I enjoyed this session looking at an extract from ‘Moby Dick’ and collecting related visual media. Physically going out and collecting things to take photos and scans of isn’t something I usually do but I found it to be an interesting way of working. It made me view the text in a more thematic way rather than looking for the exact things described. Then combining them into a collage gave me a way of reconnecting all my ideas and thoughts together to create something that conceptually represents the text. This way of collecting related visual media and combining them could be a useful way of working for me in the future.
Samuel Green Illustration 