Earlier this year I was asked to create an illustration for the cover of Lennart Ackermans' PhD thesis Probability, Causation, and Inequality of Opportunity.
The illustration needed to depict a cityscape and include two or more streets, with one showing references to a life of opportunity and privilege, with another street featuring bars, casinos and other places that could foreshadow personal ruin.
The image was to be similar in style to an illustration that I'd done a few years ago titled City and appeared in the fourth edition of Techne by Pittville Press:
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City (2015)
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A few ideas were tried out before we settled on a symmetrical composition that allowed the viewer to see down each of the two streets to the end.
On the corner between both of the two streets stands an unassuming looking building: the Experimental Philosophy Lab.
At the end of each street (and where the two vanishing points land) there are two buildings: one has lights on in every window and smoke rising from the chimney:
...while the other is in a state of dilapidation: the front door is
boarded up with a warning notice on it, the roof is falling apart, and a
bird has made a nest in the disused chimney:
This idea for including an end-point for the two streets as a metaphor for the two different trajectories in life came about as I worked on the pencil drawing.
This composition and the placement of the two different buildings just above the vanishing points felt like something out of a William Hogarth print to me, despite the lack of figures in the image. (I've written in more detail about this at the end of the post, see below)
I was sent a copy of the thesis in October and I have to say I'm really happy with how it looks in print!
Lennart suggested removing a few of the tiles in the foreground of the illustration, which worked well on the printed page and helped to break up the the two areas nicely:
Probability, Causation, and Inequality of Opportunity by Lennart Ackermans can be accessed at the link below:
https://pure.eur.nl/en/publications/probability-causation-and-inequality-of-opportunity
A little more on William Hogarth....
Anyone who knew me from my time at University College Falmouth's MA in Authorial Illustration might remember how much I loved and admired William Hogarth's work. There were so many things going on in his images: from the action of the main figures, to the background artwork on the walls in his interior scenes, to the narrative devices he used in the composition of an image itself.
This admiration for his work took me into the study of pictorial composition and formed a large part of my MA at Falmouth.
Hogarth wrote in 'Analysis of Beauty' that the eye enjoys being taken on a ‘wanton kind of chace’, which comes with intricate forms in picture composition. Two of the best examples of this are his prints Gin Lane and Beer Street, both of which were created as an attempt to educate people about the evils of gin next to the comparative wholesomeness of beer. Both prints can be ‘read’ thanks to their careful composition, but perhaps more so with Gin Lane:
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| William Hogarth, Gin Lane (1750) |
As the viewer looks at Gin Lane, attention is immediately focused on the dishevelled figure of a woman in the foreground, who appears too distracted to notice the child falling from her arms, while on the left of the picture is a thriving pawnbroker's business. The lines of the building on the left all point towards the rioting crowd on the right, while the vanishing point for the crumbling buildings on the right lead the eye past a hanging coffin and to the ruined buildings in the far background.
Leonardo da Vinci once commented on how to use vanishing points to draw attention to something:
(The artist) should make his viewpoint as far beneath the thing that he is portraying as it will itself be above the eye of the spectator when executed.
- Puttfarken, Thomas, Discovery of Pictorial Composition (Yale University Press, 2000), page 87.
This method could have been intentionally applied to Gin Lane. The two vanishing points (illustrated below) are on the same horizontal line and if you take a ruler and match them both up and they would be at the same level:
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The two vanishing points in Gin Lane; one points to death, the other to a rioting mob |
This shows where the eye-level of the viewer is, as well as dividing the picture up between the foreground and background. This could be a technique by Hogarth to make the coffin stand out to the viewer, as it sits just above the viewer's eye-level. This motif of death is continued with the woman being put into a coffin and a child impaled on a spear, indicating the descent into barbarity. I would argue that this is Hogarth’s way of including the passage of time within the composition.
The fate of the woman in the foreground is indicated by the deceased woman in the far background and the whole composition can be seen as being a visual timeline.
I thought this would be a relevant footnote to share here, as there are some overlaps between some of the things I'd studied with pictorial composition at Falmouth and this cover illustration. Perhaps it's not obvious to everyone looking at the finished cover illustration, but to me this reminded me so much of my studies of Hogarth. I thought it'd be a good moment to re-visit and share the work of one of my favourite artists and my studies of his work.
Anyway I hope this has been interesting and thank you for reading!
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