Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson was an American poet born almost two hunderd years ago. Even living in isolation, she created about 1,800 poems, many of them really beautiful.
For this illustration I went back to my old habit of counting words, I counted the words of almost all of her poems and used them to generate a portrait of Emily. This is the list of some of the most used with it’s repetitions:
heaven (53),bee (51),soul (41),noon (28),sweet (24),dew (23),breath (22),purple (21),eternity (20),butterflies (19),immortality (19),grave (18),slow (18),angels (17),robin (17),afternoon (16),Lest (16),pain (16),creature (15),dare (15),prayer (15),spirit (15),stir (15),content (14),failed (14),late (14),lips (14),tune (14),bliss (13),fair (13),faith (13),fashioned (13),frost (13),hurried (13),none (13),storm (13),anguish (12),beyond (12),brook (12),departed (12),exists (12),forget (12),gain (12),grace (12),half (12),Paradise (12)…
Since there was no portrait of Emily with enough quality, I used Midjourney to ‘imagine’ a possible portrait of her. It’s amazing what an AI can do, even not knowing where inspiration comes from.
Reading Darwin
Recently I had the opportunity to design the cover of a wonderful book of poems, “Reading Darwin While My Father Dies” by Kate Gleason. She is also the author of “Measuring the Dark” and her work has appeared in lot of different media like Best American Poetry, Verse Daily, Los Angeles Times Book Review and elsewhere.
To cover the book I created a new version of my Darwin illustration using the most used word of “On the Origin of Species”.
Thanks Kate for counting of me for this!, it was an honour to cover your wonderful poems.
Lorca’s poems
Federico GarcĂa Lorca has wide range of types of works, but I like a lot his poems, like “A poet in New York”. There is a lot artworks related to Lorca’s works, most of them really beautiful. Probably because it’s inspirational wonderful works.
For this illustration I took all the Lorca poems (in spanish) and counted the most commonly used words.
A nice list, I have to say: niños (215), muerte (210), amor (199), agua (194), corazĂłn (193), noche (180), cielo (156), canto (146), blanco (136), estrellas (130), oh (130), rosa (128), ojos (126), ay (118), luz (118), quiero (117), sangre (117), viento (116), mar (111), mira (111), verde (111), aire (105), negros (105), granada (100)… and another 4.200 different words.
The bigger are the most commonly used.
Another illustration with horizontal text.
