Nogegon – Francois Schuiten

Matt Seneca on a panel from Francois Schuiten’s Nogegon:

There’s a massive, airy openness to this picture, denying the spotted blacks that don’t actually exist in real life for the panoply of slightly different tones that do. (An airy openness, I might add, that dovetails quite nicely with the picture’s subject matter.) Too, the hand painted (watercolored, I believe) hues accomplish more in the way of texture than the flats or spangles of mechanically-applied colors can: there’s absolutely no rendering lines at all in this panel, and that’s because the dimensionality of it is so richly created by the paints that there’s simply no need. And even here the print process is as helpful as ever, fading the too-sharp focus of the meticulous line art and deep hues into the vaguer blur of real life seen through bright sunlight.