Davidson's Magic

         Andrew Davidson is a British artist who has done lots of really wonderful wood engravings as cover designs for books including quite a few sci fi and fantasy classics.  You can see some for Harry Potter and others in my prior post Davidson’s Fantastic Covers.  Today I have for you two more amazing fantasy wood engravings by Davidson.

        I’m assuming that these are illustrations of particular stories, although I don’t actually know that, let alone knowing what book they are intended to illustrate.  So I’m looking at them as individual free-standing glimpses that hint at wonderful stories I get to imagine for myself.  The first one seems like a classic fairy tale, in which some enterprising youngest son captures the sun itself, to be let out as part of the plan to win a princess…  The magnificent swoosh of light as the sun gets sucked into a bottle divides the sky into a world with light below and a sunless night sky above.  Davidson’s careful and detailed fine lines of engraving work perfectly to capture the nuance of light and shadow.

        The second piece is entitled “The Woman who Befriended Ghosts,” but if I didn’t know that title I think I would interpret this woman as encountering the characters from books.  Again, I don’t know the actual story behind the image, but I love the way the ghosts actually look transparent, but also rounded and active.  I love the details of the books, and how they turn to birds as they fly out the window.  The shadow of another specter outside the window may be a ghost that has yet to befriend our silhouetted woman - it’s a bit ominous.

        This sort of detail is simply not possible with rubber block printing, and I don’t have any ambitions of ever achieving this sort of look in my own work.  But I certainly admire it very much when Davidson does it!

[Pictures: The Man Who Bottled the Sun, wood engraving by Andrew Davidson, ca. 2018;

The Woman Who Befriended Ghosts, wood engraving by Davidson, ca. 2018 (Images from Society of Wood Engravers).]