Thomas Ligotti - The strange designs of Master Rignolo 11

 In previous posts I have illustrated my favorite Thomal Ligotti story "The strange designs of Master Rignolo".  You can read, and see, the whole story here: 

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

But why is this story so fascinating? Let's ask Twitter and Facebook first. We'll search other sources in the next posts:

Antígrafo - @AntigrafoGris - wrote a long and cogent analysis:

TBH I never had an interpretation. I usually don't look for them, and more so in Ligotti, for whom meaninglessness is so relevant. I'm haunted by the characters' relation, conspiratorial, paranoid, despondent and opaque. It's impossible to say anything certain about them.

And even more by the painting's design. The concept of a man-made void in which one can dissolve and "inhabit", waiting, empty of thought and even sight, for the stars to blink out, is perversely alluring to me.

If you forced me to torture out some sense, I could say that R thinks that he has found a way out of existence free of any effort and suffering, but it is in itself a trap. Rignolo exists reality two times betrayed. First, it's painful and, second, it's a mockery of his design.

And the unseen forces that observe and churn beneath it all is the same universe that R tries to cheat with his landscapes. He even states that you can inhabit his paintings unobserved. A solution to the presence in the window that worries N so much, we don't know why.

The bottle at the end it's what N and G wanted before all of this started and their reward for understanding that there's no easy way out, no sense or design possible and particularly for ignoring all of it.

And maybe that's the reason we all are so conspiratorial, paranoid, despondent and opaque, because we know that it's unavoidable, but we have to choose to ignore it to avoid the worst

Serhiy Krykun - made a very good illustration - it also fits my impressions of the story:

Rignolo made me doodle it while on the verge of falling asleep. An illustration to "The Strange Design of Master Rignolo" by Thomas Ligotti.

Nicole Cushing - @NicoleCushing:

"...countless stars stared down like the dead eyes of sculptured faces."

"The Strange Design of Master Rignolo" by Thomas Ligotti in NOCTUARY, magnificently dark.

And then I discovered that I myself had already made some illustrations for the story, based on real photographs of Rotterdam:

It was well into evening and for some time Nolon had been been seated at a small table in a kind of park. This was a long, thin stretch of land - vaguely triangular in shape, like a piece of broken glass - bordered by three streets of varying breadth, varying evenness of surface, and of varying stages of disintegration as each thoroughfare succumbed in its own way and in its own time to the subtle but continuous movements of the slumbering earth below. ... There were other tables here and there, all of them unoccupied, but most of the park was unused ground covered with a plush, fuzzy kind of turf.

" ... I was out in that field, the one behind those empty buildings at the edge of town where everything just slides away and goes off in all directions. And there's a marsh by there, makes the ground a little, I don't know, stringy or something. No trees, though, only a lot of wild grass, reeds, you know where I mean?"

“The face,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “It was right there, about the size of, I don’t know, a window or a picture hanging on a wall, except that it was in the ground and it was a big oval, not rectangular in any way. Just as if someone had partly buried a giant, or better yet, a giant’s mask."

Ian Davey - @unapersson:

Two men visit a landscape artist whose work has an otherworldly life of its own, and they help him reach its source.