25/01/2019

The Distance of the Moon

‘At one time, according to Sir George H. Darwin, the Moon was very close to the Earth.’

Completed in 2013 this illustration project was an attempt to visualise the Italo Calvino short story ‘the Distance of the Moon.’ The story describes a time when the Moon and Earth were, to a much greater extent than today, closely related, dependant and interconnected. Crews would sail out to meet the money where they would harvest a culinary delicacy from its surface.

‘How well I know! — old Qfwfq cried,– the rest of you can’t remember, but I can. We had her on top of us all the time, that enormous Moon: when she was full — nights as bright as day, but with a butter-colored light — it looked as if she were going to crush us; when she was new, she rolled around the sky like a black umbrella blown by the wind; and when she was waxing, she came forward with her horns so low she seemed about to stick into the peak of a promontory and get caught there. But the whole business of the Moon’s phases worked in a different way then: because the distances from the Sun were different, and the orbits, and the angle of something or other, I forget what; as for eclipses, with Earth and Moon stuck together the way they were, why, we had eclipses every minute: naturally, those two big monsters managed to put each other in the shade constantly, first one, then the other. ‘