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Exploring Near + Far's Interior Art: Row 2 (Giveaway Day Two)

Art by Mark W. Tripp for Cat Rambo's Near + Far interior
Row 2

This week sees the book getting officially launched on Wednesday. This week I’ll be doing a series of five posts about the interior art. Comment on a post to be entered to win one of three pieces of Near + Far jewelry; comment on all five posts and you’ll be entered five times.

Here’s the second row of pieces. I was talking to someone last night about why it made me so happy to use Mark’s art: he’s been showing it to me for close to two decades and I’ve always wanted to use it to illustrate something.

So, left to right: Image #1, which has a funky little seahorse feel. When looking at Mark’s pieces, I tended to use the older stuff for “Near” stories and newer for “Far”. This one went with VocoBox ™, an early story about what would happen if cats could talk. (And I think it’s fairly accurate in that regard.) My cat is named Raven, much like the cat in the story, and this is my way of preserving him, because he’s been a great cat. 🙂

Image #2 has a sparse feel to it, and there’s one of those funky little eyes peering out at you. It accompanies the story “Not Waving, Drowning” (a title shamelessly taken from Stevie Smith, because it’s so terrific), which is about the harder side of telepathy, which always seemed to me like a terrible, terrifying superpower.

Image #3 is another earlier one, and it makes me think of the idea of spaceships as living things. It accompanies RealFur, a story about the relationship between people and objects, a theme which gets explored in “Therapy Buddha” as well.

Image #4 accompanies a story that appeared in Talebones, “Memories of Moments, Bright As Falling Stars”. It’s a cypberpunk-influenced story, and one I like a lot for its grungy and sometimes eccentric world.

Image #5 also accompanies a story influenced by the cyberpunk movment, “10 New Metaphors for Cyberspace.” It’s a flash piece, or perhaps a prose poem, depending on your definition, trying to think about how we might have seen cyberspace if Gibson hadn’t shaped it so definitively.

If I picked a favorite from this batch, it would be either #2 or #5. We still haven’t seen the one that I have as a tattoo yet, or the one that I’m thinking about for a new tattoo. 😉

10 Responses

  1. Hmmm…and where is that tattoo?! The artwork is beautiful; it has a haunting simplicity that conveys so much…for me like a Rorschach that invites personal interpretation. What wonderful gems to have in your book and as pieces you can wear…I wonder if you will start a tattoo trend?

    Reply

  4. Lovely. They all have a tribal/pictographic feel to me, as if some modern, parallel society were using them as symbols. I could definitely see them as tats.

    Reply

  6. OK, I saw the row of 5 as a single creature, metamorphosing left to right. The far-left hippocampus-like one could also be a hatchling. Then we have the awkward phase, the growth spurt, the first stab at adulthood, and settling down into the final form.

    Reply

  9. I love the little pieces of art you have created and can’t wait to read the book! Thanks for sharing this!

    Reply

  10. I seem to be all about the fives today. The image looks to me like something that’s just on the edge of taking its final form. Looking forward to reading the piece which accompanies it (and the rest of them, of course!).

    Reply

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The Pinterest versions suggested gluing bottles to the back, but that seemed very large to me given the size of the flowers. Instead I used tall shot glasses, which run fifty cents each at our local Goodwill. The mounts are lengths of rebar capped with a padded top made of terrycloth from a cut-up towel and duct tape.

As a writer, I think it’s important to be creative in other ways. I cook, I garden, and sometimes I make things. Usually I give those things away because otherwise I would drown in objects. The flowers were a fun way to exercise that urge to make, and somewhere down the line I’ll be doing flash stories to go with each one. In the meantime, I’ve written the titles for those already.

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