Kathy Kavan The Shining (Kubrick Book Covers)

I chose to illustrate book covers for 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining for, as well as being my favourite Kubrick films, they all contain layers of visual symbolism both iconic and open to personal interpretation.

"Reactions to art are always different because they are always deeply personal... the film becomes anything the viewer sees in it." (Stanley Kubrick)

For the 2001: A Space Odyssey cover, I visualised the final space trip as it offered the most interesting and psychedelic space for graphical expression. In the A Clockwork Orange cover I chose what I personally found the most visceral image, Alex's terrifying eye-popping "rehabilitation". Finally, The Shining cover replicated the intense geometric carpet from the Overlook's corridors, suggesting menace on an almost unconscious graphical level.

Kubrick is Graphic, in all senses of the word - his filmmaking is a design process that realises his artistic vision. He distils every component, in every scene, in every film into exactly what it needs to be, meticulously crafting and reducing until what is left is the pure communication of its message. My aim for these fantasy covers was to produce a distilled, graphical image to represent each film and to place the style somewhere in the near past.