Alphabet sans Marrow:
An alphabet book promises a simple beginning. A is for one thing, B for another, and page by page a child learns to put the world in order. Alphabet sans Marrow keeps that familiar structure but asks what happens when the world inside the letters turns out to be stranger than promised.
I grew up with old children’s books handed down from my parents, many published between 1900 and 1930. Their stories could be funny, frightening, and unexpectedly cruel. German cautionary tales punished disobedient children with cheerful precision. Norse myths and sagas were full of betrayal and death, and in the forests of the Swedish tales, trolls waited among the trees. From these books I learned that childhood was a place where wonder and danger lived side by side, and that the two were often drawn in the same bright colors.
This alphabet grows from that inheritance, seen again through an adult’s sense of humor. Each letter and its scene was modeled in Maya and rendered in Arnold, giving the work the clean surfaces and vivid color of a modern picture book. That polish is an invitation. The viewer comes in expecting play, and only then notices the small details that unsettle it. The work exists as a hardback ABC book and as a series of individual 30 × 30 prints, and the book itself comes in two versions, one gentler and one more brutal, so the same alphabet can speak in two different voices.
Marrow is what lies at the center of the bone, the part that feeds and sustains. These letters keep the bright outer shell of childhood but hollow out its comfort, leaving something lighter, sharper, and harder to trust.
Alphabet sans Marrow is about the stories we inherit and the stories we choose to tell again. It asks how much darkness a children’s tale can hold, and why we so often laugh when we find it there.
Software: Maya and Render using Arnold
