Video: Master of illustration Alexander Wells: science fiction and grotesque
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Book illustration - "a poor relative" of big painting: many artists perceive it as a leisure craft, purely for the sake of earning money, and connoisseurs of fine art often contemptuously refuse to place illustrations on the artistic Olympus. Indeed, the works of illustrators are not self-sufficient: they are forever tied to a particular edition of a single book. But does this mean that it is impossible to show talent in them? The works of such illustration masters, how Alexander Wells, prove: you can, and how!
Each illustrator has a favorite theme. London-based artist Alexander Wells prefers genre science fiction (which, with his name, is natural). Sharp and paradoxical plots of his conflict paintings, some kind of mystery in the eyes of the heroes, plus a merciless, almost photographic realism - the artist transforms into painting the same arsenal of techniques that made science fiction famous as a genre of literature.
Wells is the author of illustrations for Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and many other works of literature of the last century. Perhaps that is why his style seems somehow elusively familiar: every illustrator tries to carefully study the experience of previous masters of illustration … The style of Alexander Wells continues the traditions known to us from the Soviet editions of science fiction - in contrast to the very popular nowadays magical realism, an example of which you can see in the almost baroque paintings of Sean Murray.
But what separates the work of Alexander Wells from the paintings of other illustrators? One of his secrets is the interaction of each drawn character with the reader, like a movie hero's gaze directly into the camera, captured by a freeze frame. Waels projects the thoughts and experiences of the author through objective images: on the heads of many of his heroes, instead of facial expressions, there are objects, creatures and symbolic images. And the artist is not afraid to shock us with strange and frightening images - because, among other things, thanks to them, we will remember forever the book, which he decorated with his illustrations.
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