I do agree; just thinking out loud, really, sieving the possibilities.  

The weirdness of the Watcher is what Lovecraft so often strove to suggest by offering fragmentary contradictory descriptions before declaring that the whole was ultimately indescribable in any human terms.  There's one story whose ultimate horror is the revelation of a gigantic elbow and no more, another in which a monster is revealed to be merely a toe, though the greater beast is left concealed from the reader.  The labyrinth might be its "fingerprints" or wrinkles in its skin, but really it's more the convoluted eddy that it makes in spacetime... OK, I'm rambling again... Anyway, I was thinking by the end of my ramble that the gleaming surface of the eye would be enough.

Again, I'll always accept any decision.

Now is the Watcher partly rugose and partly squamous then? :)

From: pinlighter@btconnect.com
To: bidavids@hotmail.com; eira.sms@virgin.net
Subject: Re: Night land : Sea of images: Plan 'A'.
Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2011 15:52:30 +0000

On drawing the Watcher: I agree with SMS.   I can't see how
what is actually an altering reality can be trapped in the narrow focus of an illustration. 
 
There is too much to do in one picture - show Palin, show Meyr, show their relationship,
and somehow also indicate they are on the skin of a gravity- and time-warping entity too
large to picture. 
 
This doesn't rule out drawing Meyr and Palin on the Watcher, of course: it's just that the
Watcher can't really appear except in the form of a tiny fragment backgrounding the action.
 
(I hate it when people second-guess my thought processes, but I wonder, Brett, if you are
not perhaps applying some of the rules of film to this different medium?? But OTOH this
background fragment of the Watcher may be close to what you are suggesting in your last)
 
 
One point that is probably made irrelevant by the above is that I've always regarded
Fabian's illustrations of the Watchers and particularly the South Watcher as canonical:
so far as that can be meaningful in a much later era when they have developed such
force they can no longer be directly viewed by human beings.   Just a referent for things
like images seen on background viewscreens, etc.
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Brett Davidson
To: SMS ; Andy Robertson
Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2011 8:06 AM
Subject: RE: Night land : Sea of images: Plan 'A'.

 
 
I really do NOT want to draw The Watcher because however well I might manage it, it'll merely be a 'Monster' which we can stare at and 'map'. As I understand, the appearance of the Watcher is entirely subjective and it's not so much its physiognomy that matters so much as its 'Personality'. This might be possible as an abstract painting but not for my pedestrian graphic style (Unless, of course, you want me to do the whole thing with a hint of 'Abstract', I suspect not. It seems we want to keep something of a 'House style' in keeping with 'Eater'). Accordingly, like God, to portray the Watcher is to lessen it. (Tempting though it is, as always, to rip off Frantisek Kupka's Black Idol).
 

Ah yes, well of course Kupka's The Black Idol was in my mind as a starting point, but the Watcher became much weirder in the writing.  I wonder how obliquely it can be represented?  Parts, synecdoche, a maps and diagrams held in Pallin's hand, that sort of thing?  An important conversation between P and M takes place on the shores of a "lake" that is the Watcher's eye, and at one point it takes on her appearance.  The human party are like ants crawling over a person's face (though even smaller, relatively).  A superficially literal but actually metaphorical representation might be possible???

Going back to Kupka, The Black Idol derives much of its effect from its obscurity.  Could it work is it were even more obscure, barely hinting, horribly, at an aspect of anthropomorphic form?

I don't want to pressure you on this as your point that to depict it literally anthropomorphically would be to lessen it is absolutely correct.  Sheer scale and strange proportions are by no means enough - the monster in Cloverfield, for example, did not merely disappoint me, it seriously pissed me off.

A possibility is that the Watcher is a landscape in itself, and perhaps something can come of that. It has a fractal, labyrinthine aspect, so aggregations of parts might be seen to diminish in perspective and then be seen as components of a greater whole.  I've attached a Virgil Finlay illustration for Aldiss' Cryptozoic.  That isn't really what I was thinking of, but something about, but the idea of a landscape unnaturally taking upon zoomorphic and anthropomorphic tropes was running through my thinking.  Now, as mentioned above, this can be at gigantic scale...

Of course Giger provides plenty of precedents too.

Hmmm, OK, that's all appropriately weird, but maybe a "reaction shot" is what will be accessible...

Going back to the "lake", P and M talk there - actually, I imply pretty clearly that they have sex.  Perhaps there is some potential in thinking of what comes from two figures on the gleaming, convex surface of an enormous eye?  A bit literal, but in this case, scale may do the trick...