The book on the nightstand: Home

What is Home for me?

These are days that I crave the sofa and a movie or the bed and a good book.
I believe that this growing desire to live the home arises from the fact that it is a place that I feel mine. I look around and what I see is about me, about us.

Carson Ellis imagines real and fantastic places, always different and yet all the same because they are able to give the adult and child reader that sense of protection, intimacy and daily warmth.

From the pages emerge illustrations made of gouache and ink, whose colors draw on a well-defined color range: if brown, gray and beige are used to give life to large surfaces, it is with blue and red colors that the illustrator leaves the reader to the discovery of details.

To guide us is a dove-colored bird that flies curiously between the pages.

Home is a physical place like the countryside, an apartment, a hut, a ship, a palace; it is a place of the imaginary like a shoe, or Atlantis; it can be “serious” or “crazy”; it takes the shape of those who live in it like that of the Slovakian duchess, the Kenyan blacksmith or the Babushka.

At the bottom of this illustrated catalog of houses in the world, the reader arrives to the Artist’s home, Carson Ellis, caught at work in the wonderful illustrated book that we are leafing through.

This is my home,
and this is me.

There’s a pleasing circularity, started from the nest in the title page that symbolically recalls in the dedication the one of the family “A Colin, Hank and Milo Meloy”, husband and children of the author.

At her first narrative experience, Home is a book to make one curious and to fantasize.

And your home, how is it? Who are you?

Reading time
an hour on your sofa or bed

Ph. Sara Cartelli
© The Eat Culture