Farhad O’Neill, Divine Comedy: Inferno (2003)

“These collections of illustrations, all oil pastel on paper, 24’‘x 18’’, were created in Belfast in 2003, and exhibited at the Gallery Space in An Culturlann Irish Language Cultural Centre. All now belong in private collections. These images later on became part of a self-published, leather-bound version of the Inferno with a print of 100 copies (minus the last image which shall go into the Purgatorio whenever I get the time to finish illustrating that (!) The translation was by Longfellow, and the forward and thanks were written by the artist. This book was unveiled at the Linenhall Library, Belfast, Ireland, in October of 2004. Many thanks to Ms Elis Creen and Ms. Deirdre Machel for helping to make this happen.

“I had first come into contact with the work of Dante Alighieri as a high school student in Canada. A senior’s English class had the Inferno included as part of their curriculum, and I was eager to read the masterwork, as some minor prior contact with the text had intrigued me greatly. I was not dissuaded by the inscription I saw above the vestibule: ‘Abandon every hope, all ye who enter!’ My interest in the fine arts guided my curiosity, and in time I was thrilled to discover the wealth of artists who had, in previous centuries, endeavoured to give a visual expression to that poet’s massive descriptive and symbolic structure. [. . .]”  —Farhad O’Neill, farhadsculpture.com (retrieved on April 7, 2022)

Read more here.