EDITOR’S NOTE: Samuel Araya previously explored his process for illustrating The King in Yellow in “The Darkening of Materials” and “No Mask.”
“But Stranger Still” is a love letter to one of my favorite paintings, Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead. Chambers took Carcosa from Bierce, so it seemed fair to take my Carcosa from Böcklin. I constructed the main island with a collage of rocks. Over that went a collage of windows, and I tried to improvise the overall structure.
When I read about the King in Yellow, my first impression of Carcosa was of a gargantuan city with labyrinths as streets, so I decided to go the complete opposite way. Carcosa as small, intimate, even claustrophobic, thus making the figure of the Stranger even more brooding. Surely in such a small piece of land, you must know of every stranger that comes ashore. This was a less “occult” interpretation of the text than before. But as a counterpoint, the figure of the King in Yellow in this painting appeared to me in a dream, just a night before I finished it, surely all strange coincidence.
Samuel Araya
Ascencion, 2018
