“Tales” was the front and back cover art for Yes’ album Tales From Topographic Oceans. Since the album cover opened out, Dean faced an interesting problem. The right half of the painting is all that would be visible to most customers in a record store, so that had to work as an image all on its own. But, since it wrapped around to the back side the entire thing had to work as a coherent image as well. Basically, he had to construct two halves that add to a greater sum that the parts. To solve this problem Dean came up with a picture that has one focus when you’re seeing the right half and a different focus when you see the whole thing.
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This illustration is for a story in McClure’s magazine in 1906 called “The Hanging of Mary Dyer.” There was an actual Mary Dyer who was an early Quaker martyr. She was executed for repeatedly returning to Massachusetts to preach Quakerism after having been banned from the colony. Pyle himself was Quaker, so the illustrations for this story likely had an extra dimension for him. Also, though it may not be apparent from the picture, this is the very act that led to Mary Dyer’s execution, so it’s a key moment of the story.
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Yigit Koroglu, an artist from Turkey, posted this painting just a few weeks ago. (Click here for a larger version.) I’d been planning to pick something from his gallery when he posted it, and one of the first things I noticed was the way he’d used textures to really sell the realism on a fundamentally bizarre creature. There’s also nice stuff going on with depth and composition, so I’ll touch on all of that in looking at how this picture works.
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