Pictures of Girls was published in 2005, after Zak Smith’s work for Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) showed in Whitney Biennial 2004. Smith made an illustration for every page of Pynchon’s 784 pages book. Here is his take on why he chose to illustrate GR:

“I checked out the first page of GR and was amazed. Just the style was gorgeous— it was intricate but also just barely out of reach— you were never sure you’d read what you just thought you’d read. I think that’s why it’s so haunting and why ten years later I decided I needed to pin all those images down.he fe feel like Gravity’s Rainbow had all these fleeting images that really sort of called out for this kind of treatment, but not a lot of other books do.”

I admire Smith’s drawings of his girlfriends, he creates such great images out of crowded backgrounds. He keeps all his drawings at his website under archive. But here are some samples of his work…