The paintings on which the cover design is based are acrylic on canvas, with a textured undercoating. In these twin paintings, I have tried to depict souls in the afterlife. What survives death is the spirit/mind/soul, which is also the aura. While a graphic metaphor cannot properly depict an experience that takes place solely in the mind, it serves a purpose if it suggests an otherworldly environment where souls slumber as a point of light, or expand faintly to suggest their incarnated form.
This following passage is from "Chapter 2: Getting Adjusted," which after a long dream sequence, is Merlin's first impression of the afterlife:
Merlin Zauber found himself glowing like a lantern. He could see lights everywhere, like fireflies on a summer evening, except the little glowing spheres were steady, not blinking. A being of light was hovering nearby, gently glowing, and seemed to be reaching out for him. It struck Merlin that this glowing, angelic presence was speaking to him, even though there was no sound except thoughts that flashed through his mind like a remembered conversation or a telepathic message.
The thumbnails below represent various stages of the cover painting on its way to completion. To expand a thmbnail, just click it anywhere.
Before I even approached the blank canvas, I fully understood that what I was attempting was impossible, since ideas like this could be expressed only through metaphor. My original conception was to depict the transition from this life to the afterlife in terms of warm, earthy burnt sienna transforming itself into a heavenly cerulean blue, and at the point of transition, the spirit of Merlin Zauber being met by the spirit of Alexander.
I liked the result, but felt that it wasn't quite "right." I took pains to depict the figures like the awkward characterizations one sees in prehistoric cave or rock art. The trouble is, this isn't the way I remembered it. What I recalled was an energy body (aura) without a physical body. And as applied to the afterlife, even this was an internal construct, not something seen externally. Pondering further, I felt that colors that excited the senses were out of place in this environment. After all, in the afterlife the senses are missing. Colors suggest temperature. Where there is no awareness of temperature, much less temperature change, this metaphor was sending the wrong message. Besides, the reaching out with only one hand is too half hearted for the kind of reception that I envisioned. Grasping with both hands is closer to what I had in mind, even if the energy body has only the memory of hands, it is the physical body alone that has hands.
Reluctantly, I painted over the warm, burnt sienna. I made the background a darker blue, with streaks of white to suggest other souls in repose. The hands were a problem, so I made the hands of both figures reaching out to each other. I liked this version, but was disturbed that the figures seemed too substantial, rather like mummies than discarnate spirits. That meant that I had to try again.
I worked some more on the background to recapture the sense of transition from one level to another, but more subtly than in the first pass. The mummy-like figures I transformed into semi-transparent beings of light. Had I more time, I might have used a series of glazes to achieve a more disembodied look. But since this was intended as cover art, I was more closely tied to the metaphor than I might have wished.
While I can't say that I was fully "satisfied" with the third pass result, I thought, considering that my time was running out since I had promised both text and cover art by the end of August, 2005, I would have to leave the front cover panel as is, and create a back panel with a background that would look approximately the same.
On the back panel,I created only one figure, having expanded itself from the point of light configuration that suggests a slumbering spirit. The soul I had in mind was Eric, the thirteen-year-old patient of Merlin's, whose suicide may have precipitated Merlin's fatal stroke. While spirits in the afterlife are no longer capable of emotional reactions, the memory of emotion remains. Thus, Eric the spirit expands in what to mortal eyes would look like a gesture of surprise, joy, or triumph.
The second panel was much easier for me than the first one, mainly because by then I had accepted a working compromise between how I seemed to remember the afterlife and what I thought might make an effective book jacket. Of the two panels, I think I prefer the back to the front. This was the art that I submitted to the publisher, Xlibris.
To create the final cover, Sherwin Soy at Xlibris darkened all but the spirit images to make room for title, byline, and book summary. While this preserves only part of the paintings, it seemed to me that Mr. Soy's action made the covers truer to my original concept than the complete paintings did. After all, The Passing of Merlin Zauber is about spirits in the afterlife, where everything is a mental construct, and there is no scenery and background as we know it in the dimension of the living.
© Copyright 2005 by Robert J. R. Rockwood. All rights reserved.
