It still might be too early to call it a trend, but between Zak Smith’s illustrations for each age of Gravity’s Rainbow and Matt Kish’s renderings of scenes from Moby-Dick and Heart of Darkness, the practice of artists reinterpreting the words from classic novels is a recent development that may never get old. According to his own calculations, Allen Crawford spent approximately 2560 hours on his addition to this growing canon, with his lovely illustrated version of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (out in May from Tin House, the publisher who also put out Kish’s and Smith’s books). As you can tell from these images, the long hours paid off, and Crawford’s tribute is a beautiful piece of art that every Whitman lover will want on their bookshelf.
Image credit: Allen Crawford. Courtesy of Tin House
Image credit: Allen Crawford. Courtesy of Tin House
Image credit: Allen Crawford. Courtesy of Tin House
Image credit: Allen Crawford. Courtesy of Tin House