Judging a Book By It’s Cover
Artist Owen Richardson shares exclusively with Socrates+ how the new covers for The Chronicles of Narnia came to life. For more amazing art from Owen, please check out his Portfolio
Creating new cover art for The Chronicles of Narnia series has been an extraordinary, singular experience. It has been a career milestone that may never be topped; and has enriched my life in a deeply spiritual way.
For as long as I can remember, I have been aware of these uniquely treasured books. As a young reader, I read and enjoyed them almost as a matter of course; as one might do in order to tick the boxes of the “Fantasy-Fiction-Must-Read-
I have, over the past twenty five years or so, had the opportunity to be involved with many stage productions of The Magician’s Nephew and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, designing and creating props and scenery. My wife, Amy, even portrayed the White Witch onstage. Our children have grown up with Narnia as part of our peculiarly artsy family milieu, and there are many Narnia-based shorthands in our vocabulary. I confess I love it when, reacting to some domestic misstep, Amy shouts “FOOL!” as only her Jadis can, and like Uncle Andrew, besotted with Jadis, I murmur, “demm fine woman.” I totally “get” uncle Andrew.
It was during one of those stage performances years ago that the scales began to fall from my eyes and the depth and real power of these books began to come into focus.
Picture a dark stage. A silhouette of the Stone Table, where Aslan’s lifeless body lies bound and is outlined by a twilit horizon. A pale pin-spot barely lights Lucy and Susan, who weep quietly in each other’s arms. A reverent voice-over narration begins:
“I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been—if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you—you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again. At any rate that was how it felt to these two.”
Watching that scene, I did feel, I think, something close to how Susan and Lucy felt. All at once, I felt Lewis reach deep into my soul, pouring into it a powerful lesson; teaching me by parable the profound concept of Aslan’s atonement. The thunderclap that broke that stone table – that sham stone table of plywood and styrofoam that I had only recently designed and painted – and shook the theatre as the lights went suddenly out, was not just a sound effect. It was a spiritual witness.
Art has this kind of power.
The task of an illustrator, especially of book covers, is to tempt that infamous idiom: to “judge a book by its cover.”
But the beloved Chronicles of Narnia are no ordinary set of books. These are very special stories of the profoundest kind. They are parables illustrating the problems and questions that all “Daughters of Eve” and “Sons of Adam” encounter on their individual mortal quests. Do I dare put my hand to such an important and beloved work? Where do I even begin?
I found direction; maybe even permission, by trying my very best to follow C.S. Lewis’s purpose for creating this beautiful world and the stories within it.
Lewis wrote that a true understanding of the Divine and its connections and interactions with us, is sometimes inhibited by a forced obligation to feel a certain way about “sacred things:”
“The whole subject,” he wrote, “was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.”
With this direction in mind, I began to do my part to help readers steal past those watchful dragons and try to bring the stories in all their profound richness to life as a book cover.
As I read through all of the books anew, I was amazed at how richly visual and crammed with symbolic shorthand these books are. How bright and playfully romantic; so youthfully innocent; and then in turn, so violent, and gravely mature; darkly mysterious; and not a little scary. I wondered at how I could have missed or forgotten so much in previous readings! My copies of the books, now dogeared, heavily marked in red; fattened with my stacks of quick, thumbnail sketches on many dozens of sticky notes, show just how many ideas are crammed into its pages. C.S. Lewis already did all that hard work for me! My task then became one of choosing which among all those wonderful concepts to use. All I had to do was start drawing and painting!
I knew by the pictures Lewis showed my imagination that the covers should be grounded in that classically romantic medieval mythology he loved so much. For inspiration I turned to some of the illustrations he might have seen as a boy: the classic fairy tale illustrations by Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth, with his clash of knights in combat; the mystery of his priests and magicians; the terror of his pirates and the manly thunder of Colonial battle. At the same time, Narnia, for me, seemed to call for a wide and sweeping landscape: something vast, romantic and breathtaking. Visions such as you might see from the Hudson River School; yet with the wild, darkly English action of a seascape by J.M.W. Turner. And certainly the charm and sweetness of Pauline Baynes’s original illustrations had much to teach me.
An artist has an advantage in storytelling; and another old cliche, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” turns out to be absolutely true. With a single image, the artist is able to create a visual harmony and communicate real feeling, and through the use of visual cues and symbols, tell a deeper story; a story that is perhaps more felt than merely seen. In a way, art and literature really are types of Deep Magic.
Through this Deep Artistic Magic, the message of the Stone Table, broken for the sake of Edmund; this symbolic type and shadow, along with all its implications, is, for me, the central story of The Chronicles of Narnia. That “greater love hath no man than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends,” and thereby offering redeeming Grace to a soul in trouble.
Creating these book covers has enriched my life. I know I’ll be returning to Narnia. If you’ve been there before, I hope you find it as beautiful, exciting and as comforting as ever. Maybe you traveled to Narnia long ago, and, like some of our friends in the books, have forgotten the treasures to be had there. Maybe you feel you’re too old for fairy tales. C.S. Lewis has something to say about that too:
“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
