..... or it illustrates something from language - but then you go beyond the literal illustration and render something different than what would be expected. In my case, while in one drawing I took Cthulhu as a starting point, mine looks nothing like the thousands of others that cannot get beyond the stereotype of it (interestingly enough they stem from a sketch by Lovecraft himself, the sketch not doing justice to what he describes in the novel).
I generally don't like to 'explain' my work, because when pressed I say that if put into words, I'd be a writer - but words are a linear progression: you read a novel from front to back, but a work of art is nonpareil, holistic.
But if put to the test, you could put most figurative artwork into that pigeonhole, and in particular the Romantics. Is not the Laokoon, frozen in time of the highest agony, a Illustration? I tried to wrap my head around this dilemma, reading Lessing's essay on the subject - at that time wanting to understand what Hausner's Laokoon paintings were about (Laokoon in der Umlaufbahn, etc), and the contemporaneous work of Fuchs, the Anti-Laokoon.
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