One of my favorite books is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which I chose to base my next illustration project on. The assignment was to illustrate a scene from a book. For those who have not read it, like most of Huxley's work, it's an existential novel based in a dystopia world. Children are not born, they are grown in a lab; each child is assigned a cast system that dictates their entire lives, down to what job they hold, their intelligence level, and place within society. Marriage and love are not permitted, as they are painful and difficult; instead, casually promiscuous behavior is regularly practiced in the society. All persons take "soma", a tranquilizing euphoria drug that inhibits pain and feeling receptors artificially, and many people live in a semi-conscious state. Because god and religion create pain and strife, the society is atheistic. The main character of the novel, John, is an outsider to the society as he was vaginally born from his mother; John is called "John the Savage" because he does not belong to a cast system and does not take his soma.
The scene I illustrated is at the end of the novel where (spoiler) John, in a depressed state, flees to a secluded lighthouse after realizing his love interest will never be monogamous with him and love and understand him because of her societal indoctrinations. While at the lighthouse, John vows to dedicate his life to God and self-mutilates daily by whipping himself in repentance. Eventually, people spy on John and film his actions to exploit his pain and alienation. Eventually, alone in the lighthouse, John hangs himself.
Because of the dark nature of the scene, I kept the colors simple and dark… the color scheme consisting of dark purple and pale yellow. The fact that the colors are opposites on the color wheel emphasizes the contrast between the life John is living and the society he lives in. The slightly abstracted forms and negative space are meant to help conceptualize the scene rather than realistically depict it, which furthers the idea that in the scene, John struggles with what is real and what is a farce.
