station eleven

Today I want to drop a little post about something unrelated to music. My recent art project revolved around my favourite book, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

A comic book spread open to reveal a sea in front of a crimson sky, two moons. A man and a white dog. Title of the comic: Dr. Eleven, Vol. I No 2, The Pursuit by M.C.. Box across the bottom of the open page: I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on earth.

It’s been my favourite book years before we entered a pandemic. I’ve carried it around with me for months, reread it several times – needless to say the book itself isn’t in mint condition. I don’t read a lot anymore, I think most people read less when they get older. But I still love reading so very much for giving me these different places to explore.

For my project I’ve painted scenes from the book, decorated each page with a quote. It’s my second complete sketchbook that follows a specific theme and is more of an art book than just sketches. I started with picking random pages, painted what I saw. Later I chose pages from missing chapters and looked for the images most clear in my mind. Some are very artistic, others more realistic. It’s made me appreciate the book even more, jumping between different scenes and visualizing them in detail.

Watercolour painting of a human in front of a colourful scene with blocks of dark on a horizontal line. A caption reads: "40 - a somewhat shadowy health crisis unfolding in Georgia and Russia"

We all have had to learn to live with a pandemic ruling over our lives. It has affected all of us differently. If our pandemic had been the Georgia Flu that developed in the world of Station Eleven, we probably wouldn’t have had time to learn to deal with it. We’d be dead. Hardly anyone survives the fictional pandemic, which changes life for those who do dramatically.

The book tells stories of a few characters before and after the collapse, all of them connected through comics of a damaged space station. Some scenes are set in the world we know, some portray a world twenty years after the end of society as we know it.

I always hoped for a movie to be made, to see these powerful images come to life. I knew it wouldn’t be able to capture the world of Station Eleven entirely, cause a movie does not have enough minutes. I wouldn’t even mind, because for me movies and the books they are based on are separate entities. But when I found out recently that there would be a whole series I got really excited. And it also meant it was finally time to finish my sketchbook.

Half the pages in it were completed after I found out there would be a show, but none of them were influenced by trailers I had seen – I made sure to stick to my ideas.

This shot I painted years before the show was announced is incredibly similar to how the HBO series displays it, see trailer.

The show is coming to a German streaming platform tomorrow, and I can’t wait. I don’t know if it will live up to my expectations. It could very well be a major disappointment. But by my philosophy, if you will, it can never take anything away from my Station Eleven experience – it can only add.