Cover design for Thaliad
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Marly has set Thaliad in the future, though a future that is oddly timeless in the sense that its tiny community seek out a small-town environment where they feel safer than they would in the cities. Small, in this case, is definitely good. I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but the people she writes about have to learn to fix for themselves in ways that would be familiar to rural, self-sufficient communities of the past. There are references scattered throughout the book to such skills as carpentry and sewing, and the imagery that kept suggesting itself to me was rooted in the artisan traditions of quilt-making and sampler work that are so rich in universal themes: the celebrations of betrothal and marriage, birth and death. Depictions of animal husbandry, the agrarian year, harvest plenty, winter thrift, home-building and worship. I thought too of the Bayeux tapestry, where events of magnitude are presented in a style that is deceptively picturesque. In that marvel of stitchery, dismemberment and horror are pricked into scenes of jaunty vividness, and are all the more shocking for it.
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XI. The Rebel Sky
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The girls above are not necessarily the twins of the poem (not the first Youman’s twins in her writings ether, as twin brothers are at the heart of her novella Val/Orson) but generically represent the notion of twins in much the same way as a winged head carved on a tombstone, no matter how primitive, generically represents the notion of an angel.
IV. Gabriel the Weeper
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I’ve always been moved at the ways in which men and women in small American communities of the past found ways to celebrate life in simple decorative arts, and I’ve tried here to honour that tradition for a story clearly embedded in the same struggles and truths.
Chapter Tailpiece
Possible border for the Title Page
Image for the back cover.
Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog: 
you nailed it, plain and simple.
oh, and you’ve added more!! i love the little bird, the print on him is too sweet!
and the eye…
Lovely surprises! And Mike remembered the name of the applique that my grandmother gave me–cockscomb & currants, though it differs from the ones on line. Shall send you a copy, because it has certain elements in common with what you’ve done!
These have a look of prints, somewhat like in the old book illustration style of , what? a hundred years ago? This is all looking superb.
Marja-Leena, I used references of American folk-art, and as such quilting and stencilling are crafts at the heart of the images I’m making for the book. There are all sorts of reasons for this. The iconography of folk-art is universal and instantly recognisable. Marly’s writing is so rich that it needs not to be met with anything attempting to match it in visual terms. These simple images aren’t intended as illustrations at all, but decorations to embellish the pages and provide brief but evocative resting points. It would be a great temptation to ‘illustrate’ and match Marly’s words with elaborate, densely wrought episodes from the story, but such images would be battling it out with the words. These decorations are my solution to placing images within the text.
awesome 🙂
i love the ladies, the light side and the dark.
it’s going to be such a beautiful book!
Twin girls figure significantly in Thaliad, and these reference them. I’m trying to eschew the specific here, finding ways to decorate without being illustrative. There needs to be plenty of room for the reader’s mind to run with Marly’s wonderful descriptions. Important that the images be meditations on the text, rather than illustrations of it.