Artist’s Note
The Night Book is a folio of mixed-media paintings: pencil, ink, watercolor, Aquarelle pencil & acrylic. The paintings began as pencil, later ink, drawings made in my bedside Moleskine and Stillman & Birn sketchbooks while in that zone between wakefulness and sleep, A world devoid of reason but rich in images: half-formed, unrelated, surreal, erotic, even terrifying. A critic likened my phantasmagoric paintings to graphic poetry. Inspiration for the Night Book project came from Goya’s Los Caprichos (1799), and from François Desprez’s (1655) and Gustave Doré’s (1854) illustrations for Rabelais’s Pantagruel (1655), in my novel, The Nude Pianist (Fictionaut, 2016), a few of these paintings appear as the work of Francesco Martinelli.
All these drawings are protected by International Copyright. Click on the paintings to enlarge.
