Saturday, May 9, 2015

Kiss Kiss

Few years ago I made a couple of surrealistic paintings. Little did I know, I would be able to use one of these paintings as inspiration for a book cover. I wanted the cover of ‘Erratic’ (the erratic life of Porsche Gibeon) to summarize the things women like best: make-up and shoes. Referring to the profession of the protagonist Porsche Gibeon, Tee-designer, the cover design also had to be usable as print on a T-shirt.

Reducing stories into one image is something I use in my Skredch-blog. Events of daily life are reduced into drawings, or pictographs, based on one or only a few basic lines. A style resembling comics or cartoons, which I think is not appropriate for this ‘edgy romance’ novel. I had to think of something new.


Finishing the first book on Porsche Gibeon, I remembered my surreal artwork ‘Kissemee’: a woman symbolized by lips. (The picture on the left is published in our catalogue for the Holland Art Fair, The Hague, 2005). Using this remarkable image as basis, I have created the character pictured above, which only consists of shoes and lips. A perfect summary, realistic, reproducible upon Tees and providing possibilities to create similar images for future books in this series.

Kiss Kiss, is a collection of short stories by Roald Dahl, master of the ‘Tales of the Unexpected’. As admirer of this great author, I have used surprising twists as an important element of Porsche’s story. 
My surrealistic painting as published on the cover of our catalogue for the
Holland Art Fair 2005 (The Hague, The Netherlands)