As part of the writer.s due diligence, I.ve been reading guides to self-publishing. It.s a fascinating world. Different than academic writing. The scale is larger. You.re writing to an audience, not the professor. And it.s going to be published with your name on it. Out in the real world.
One of the chapters in Alison Baverstock.s The Naked Author (this just happened to be the title they had at the library, it.s a good read so far) is ‘Commissioning Images and Illustrations’. Before reading it, I hadn.t much thought about the cover. It would have the title and the author.s name and a designer would give it some shape and a splash of colour. But she makes a good point: the cover is the point of first contact between the book and potential readers. Make it good. She discusses how to go about getting photography or image rights. And then she talked about commissioning artwork. That captured the imagination. Afterwards, I was surprised it never occurred to me on my own to try this. Because I had been through the commissioning process before and all I can say is, ‘What an experience!’.
Twenty years ago, I went through the commissioning process. Come to think of it, over twenty years ago. One of Francis Bacon.s portraits, The Study of Pope Innocent X had fascinated me. The bold brushstrokes. Barbaric. And the stillness of agony. It.s funny, because nothing much else of Bacon stands out to me. But I really am smitten with this portrait. Last summer, there was a Bacon exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto. It didn.t have the effect I thought it would have. At any rate, twenty plus years ago, I was washing dishes at the Cordova Seaview Restaurant. I started putting away some funds to commission this thing. I called up some artists. Most weren.t interested. One lady hung up on me. The conversation went like this, ‘Oh the Bacon? Yes, I.m familiar with Bacon. Which one? That one?!? *click*’. Eventually, I found out one of my friends’ dads was into Francis Bacon. Carl Coger. He had studied Bacon at the Art Institute of Chicago. He would be delighted to take on the project. We went through images and images looking for the right colours (it.s amazing how different pictures capture colour in subtlety different ways). That summer, he set up his easel in the courtyard. A big easel. I got to see the whole process. Partitioning the canvas into a grid. The different layers. Mixing the colours. He really enjoyed making it as well.
Flash forward to last winter. I get this letter in the mail from the artist. Wrong address and wrong postal code. Somehow it made it to my building where it was placed on top of the community mailbox. Good work Canada Post! But I couldn.t open the letter for a long time. I thought it was the bad news letter. You see, a few years ago, my friend had met this girl on the street. A former schoolteacher from England. She hurt her jaw in an accident, the doctor prescribed her some narcotic painkillers and you know the rest. He tried to help her out and got dragged into the whole affair. For that reason, I thought the letter must have been bad news. Why else would he write? Well, damnation, finally I had to open it. It took me a week and a half of looking at it each day. It turns out, they were putting on a ‘Fabulous Fakes’ art show and he wanted to exhibit the work!
We talked on the phone. He.s over eighty now, almost blind. He wanted to exhibit the work as a sort of swan song. As I bike (pedal bike) and he doesn.t drive anymore, he got his grandson to deliver the work to the gallery (a nice young lad studying economics at UVic, we discussed Piketty.s Capital which was sitting on the coffee table). I went to the show as well, it was a bit of a thrill to see the little abstract saying the painting came out of the ‘Edwin Wong Collection’! He was very happy his work could go on exhibition one last time (he had other pieces there as well). We chatted about the good old days. It.s funny, I was just a kid back then, how the times change. And one thing that stuck in my mind is how art brings people together, in a good way. We need more of this!
So…after the digression, I thought about putting out a Call for Art. For a cover illustration. Here.s what I.ve come up with so far. The idea is to go around and ask the nice art galleries, art shops, and art schools if they can post this up. Then it will be a waiting game to see who responds. I hope the process is as fun as the first time. Here.s the rough draft of the Call for Art:
CALL FOR ART
‘DEAD MAN’S HAND’
DESCRIPTION: oil on canvas, 30×30
CONCEPT: Depict the moment Wild Bill Hickox picks up the ‘dead man’s hand’ while playing poker. Contemporary setting (not Wild West). Figures include: three gamblers, one bartender, one waitress, one patron, and a dog. Sparse furnishings. Although the gunman who shoots Wild Bill does not appear in the painting, the painting is painted from the point of view of the gunman as he is entering the saloon.
THEME: Two themes. The first theme is the unexpected and the disproportionately critical affect the unexpected has on life. The ‘dead man’s hand’ is a visual representation of the unexpected, much like how the silver pieces in Rembrandt’s Judas returning the thirty pieces visually represent the emotion of greed. As such, the painting should draw the viewer’s eye to the ‘dead man’s hand’. The second theme is to capture the look of surprise and tension in the painting’s subjects. It is that split second after the gunman enters but before full recognition happens. A good study of the psychology of what is desired might be found in Repin’s They did not expect him.
INTENT: It is the intent that a reproduction of the painting or a detail from the painting will serve as the cover illustration of a book on literary criticism. The book discusses the role of the unexpected in drama with an emphasis on tragedy. Critics, academics, dramatists, and people interested in the growing field of uncertainty comprise the target audience.
To receive further details on the commission, please contact Edwin Wong by email at — or by phone —.