Troppa Felicitá In Questo Bosco…

…or Too Much Happiness in the Forest

I was commissioned again by Rešad Majo Otan Hasanović to do cover for his new book. The name of the book is Too Much Happiness in the Forest and the title is a quote of Jesuit Joe, a character from Hugo Pratt´s graphic novel of the same name. Jesuit Joe is anti-hero, who equally does deeds of good and unreasonable violence. Characters of Majo´s books are the same. When I started working on the cover initially I had in mind Corto Maltese like a character, an explorer and an adventurer, an observer and a protagonist, but I couldn´t make myself to visualize the cover. Than, I realized that Majo perfectly fits the picture. Self published writer whose day job is nursing, a refugee from Bosnian war, living in Finland, a poet, a comic books enthusiast, an explorer of Indochina… I did a portrait  of him, as the main character of the book whose story has been told while he lays on the floor, unconscious, after hitting a cabinet in kitchen with his head. A small death. Like finished book. After all, the book is a one life of the writer, told and lived inside the pages.

So my idea was to have a portrait of the author, bleeding as the story is being told (a bit of David Bowie´s Aladdin Sane lurking in-there), but the elements of the title, the Forest, to be emphasized by actual lacking of the immediate symbols for the forest – the trees. He is observed by Moai statues as Gulliver by Lilliputians, echoes of Rapa Nui people who disappeared because of the ecological disaster caused by cutting all the forest from Easter Island. Something that we, the more “advanced” civilization, are doing on a global level. A symbol of plane is there to represent a mechanical bird, a dying soul carrier, because all the birds are gone with the trees.

Majo was not really happy about dying part 🙂

So we came to the compromise, that I am not happy about 🙂

Too much aggression in the Easter Island for my taste.
So I decided to store this portrait into the net, for it is vast and infinite…

Majo was not really happy about dying part 🙂

So we came to the compromise, that I am not happy about 🙂

Too much aggression in the Easter Island for my taste.