David Lupton‘s illustrations have a taste of the macabre about them, the lines lingering on the edge of a melancholic darkness, a childhood horror that lives under the bed. Lupton’s drawings are gothic, they’re an aesthetic fog that slowly seeps into your bones, brings up the smells of the hearth, the low dark clouds of Northern Europe casting their long shadows over everything they pass.
What’s wonderful about his style is that it provokes the imagination, creates a narrative that runs deep, is, in a sense, a visual language based in literature rather than art.
In that way it’s rather old fashioned, harks back to the illustrators of the 19th Century who enthralled me when I was younger, when I spent time in the forest of my imagination.