Matt Kish once owned the coolest suit jacket ever and he’s such an amazing human that he let me borrow it for a prom date. Most of two decades later, he created 552 artworks – one per day for a year and a half! – each inspired by a single page in a particular edition of his favorite book, Moby-Dick. (The suit jacket? Nothing to do with Matt’s art or Herman Melville at all. Just something I think about occasionally. It was a really cool jacket.)
Anyway, I finally finished a long, deliberate read of Matt’s resulting book – Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page – and look, it’s been out for almost 15 years now, and it got a ton of great reviews from people way more qualified than me to discuss art and literature. I just wanted to make sure I put into the world what an incredible thing this is that Matt did, and why I love it.
It turns out that Matt and I had the same Illustrated Classic Editions version of Moby Dick (no hyphen, for some reason) as kids. I read mine a lot and still have it.
But where Matt read Melville’s unabridged whale book in high school, I didn’t get around to it until the last 5 years or so. And while I knew the overall story well enough, I wasn’t ready for what a strange, complicated, beautiful, experimental, and compelling journey it was.
But that’s not what this is about – this is about Matt‘s book, and what a strange, complicated, beautiful, experimental, and compelling journey it is.
I’ve been a fan of Matt’s art and his approach to it since we got back in touch many years after college, so I had seen a fair amount of his Moby-Dick pieces online and in person before I finally got a copy of Moby-Dick in Pictures. I was still floored by seeing the whole project as it was intended, and I knew I wanted to read it thoroughly and not flip through it like a coffee table art book.
It took me a long time because I wanted it to. Even when there were only a dozen or so words in the passage Matt selected for a given page, I did my best to take them in repeatedly and with consideration. Same with the art, which is just an entirely different beast when considered as a whole as well as its individual pieces. Themes and patterns and character traits and outliers and hints and secrets all started peeking back at me and unfolding in ways that only happened because I was turning pages and pulling threads.
Matt’s work is so vast and varied that it’s pretty much impossible for me to pick a single representative page from the book as a favorite. (A few even weave in echoes of the black-and-white illustrations from the kids’ version, and those really struck some chords.) That said, here’s one of the many that I love for both Matt’s art and Melville’s words:
By the end, I was caught up in Ishmael’s tale and Matt’s pictures, just like when I was a kid churning through the final pages of the adventure. And it was awesome. Just a completely thrilling and new way to experience this incredibly familiar story.
One of the things I try to live by is the idea that when someone creates a thing that brings you joy or cracks your heart, you should let them know it and then tell other people about it. Matt’s a prolific artist and he sells originals and prints and zines that I can’t get enough of, and I hope you’ll check them out.
John Booth Writes 