Sperm Whale Breaching in the Moonlight

INSPIRATION: While in a viciously miserable mandatory Saddleback Community College Political Science Class in early October of 1980, this render was inspired by a travelog recorded in quillpoint ink on a page of an old captain's log book found and published by the "Reader's Digest" people in the 1960s. I'd read it after finding it on my mother's bookshelves the night before. The narrative, written in the the 1920s while under full canvas sails northeast of Hawaii and bound for Japan, a passenger sloop's sea captain recorded a breach of a sperm whale battling a giant squid under the light of a full moon at night.

THE CLIENT: Yet another Japanese illustrated literary classic edition of Herman Melville's "Moby Dick: or The Whale." "Hakugei: The Legend of the Great White Whale" was an edited and assembled anthology of rendered art based on Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby Dick. The Tokyo publishing house assembled this coffee-table sized book from a number of illustrations focused upon both classic American "Charles W. Morgan" class American whaling ships and renders of the Great White Whale which was described from surviving crew members of the 1820 Essex ramming incident by a bull sperm whale northwest of Hawaii in 1820 for a 1989 multi-artist graphic novel in a solid and very well-bound cover.

THIS RENDER: Not originally intended to be included in my "Special Delivery" to Tokyo, I doodled this in 1980 while sitting through a dismal Political Science Class which was mandatory at Saddleback Community College in the Fall Semester. Listening to that "Bleeding Heart Liberal" professor drone on and on about how the American Medical Association condoned the thriving industry of symptom and pain management over the far less financially lucrative delivering of medical cures to the suffering masses--which was back then and IS now true--was a pure example of "Purgatory." This woman made me feel like my soul was jailed. But "Sketch-a-Doodling" in my notebooks did get me straight "A"s and 100 %s on all my tests and quizzes.

BOOK SYNOPSIS: "Moby-Dick; or, The Whale" is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book is the sailor Ishmael's narrative of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that on the ship's previous voyage bit off Ahab's leg at the knee.

ART CATEGORY: I rendered this illustration study with ballpoint pens, inks, and India ink. the seawater surface was rendered with several ballpoint sessions. It was all I could do to keep my head from exploding while listening to this ugly-ass teacher spew and rant.

ILLUSTRATION SUBJECT: Sperm Whale Chow Time!