illus. for The Princess and Curdie by MacDonald 1927

This illustration for The Princess and Curdie is by Dorothy Lathrop. It’s a flurry of black ink on paper. It looks like an intense scene, a battle maybe, but there are all these doves floating around, adding a strange kind of peace to all the chaos. The surface is fascinating, it has that wonderful, slightly coarse texture that you get from ink on paper. The way Lathrop uses contrast, with the black ink against the white, is really dynamic. Look at the horse's eye; it's so wide and wild. It’s a tiny detail but it really animates the whole scene. The dove motif has an interesting relationship with the harsh weaponry. There’s something dreamlike about the combination. Thinking about other illustrators, someone like Aubrey Beardsley comes to mind, in the way he used stark black and white to create really intense, imaginative scenes. It’s like they are both asking, how can we create a whole world from just ink on paper? It's a reminder that art is as much about what we imagine as what we see.