There are good book covers and there are bad book covers and then there are book covers made by Keely O’Shannessy, who was out on her own as a high-performing artist, not untypically designing up to as many as 20 different covers for each book, each perfectly and beautifully executed, each a distinct work of art—you could spot the covers she designed and illustrated from a mile away. Keely covers always looked like Keely covers. I would have fainted with pleasure to have a Keely cover. Every author wanted a Keely cover. She would have turned 50 this Saturday just gone; cancer got there first, and her funeral was held on Friday, at St Matthew in the City, Auckland, and of course it was terribly sad and of course it was heartbreaking. There were eulogies from her husband Nick Dravitzki, her oldest friend Louise Russell, and others. She enjoyed an idyllic childhood growing on Great Barrier Island. There was a cat called Morrissey. Her and Nick and their son Leo had what they called DB: domestic bliss. She was deeply loved; she is deeply loved…The eulogies briefly touched on her artistic practice as New Zealand’s best cover designer. As follows are thoughts from five authors who were lucky enough to have Keely covers.
Laurence Fearnley, author of Scented (Penguin, 2019)
I remember that Scented began, for me, with a mental image of a very dark piece of timber—a beam from an old wool-store, one that would have gathered a sheen from the proximity of greasy wool. I visualised the whole novel in shades of deep-brown, weighty, and very interior. So it was a wonderful surprise to discover Keely O’Shannessy’s visual response to the manuscript. Her vision was light and airy: the background was turquoise-blue. Small, coloured-glass bottles containing leaf, flower, and berry cuttings completed the scene. There was a generosity in the space around the objects: they breathed with a life I hadn’t foreseen, and the simple sans-serif font was equally un-fussy, and beautiful. But the thing that really impressed me was Keely’s commitment and eye for detail, the small magical tweaks. For a start, she had gone outside and collected the foliage from her own garden and surroundings, and photographed them (in autumn). It seems to me that cover-designers are really the first ‘public readers’—that is, they provide the first independent response to the novel, beyond that of working editors. Keely’s take, displayed in her remarkable cover design, was so generous and so beautifully composed—she ‘saw’ the novel, completely. And for that I am very grateful.
Kirsten McDougall, author of Tess (Victoria University Press, 2017)
I was publicity manager at Victoria University Press from 2013-2021, and it was always exciting the day cover design options arrived from Keely. They were often after deadline but good things take time (I remember her taking days to design the paper cut-outs on Jane Arthur’s Craven cover.) Book cover design is its own form; being good at design doesn’t mean you can do books, but Keely was the real deal. She just got it; could take a few elements from a book and make something you wanted to pick up and look into. She just knew what a cover should do. I remember keenly wanting Keely to do the cover of my novel Tess. She got the mood right. I’m sad she won’t be here to do any more books that I write. I got to know her a little when she moved to Wellington and we shared the same studio space. She was kind, and gentle and softly spoken and generous. Important: Keely was always a stand-out dresser, the best-dressed person in the room. I think she had a deeply aesthetic approach to life, which I respect. It’s a gift to others to dress well in public; more people need to rise up against the polar fleece puffer jacket mediocrity of this country.
Anna Jackson, author of Pasture and Flock (Auckland University Press, 2018)
I didn’t have a clear idea for the cover of Pasture and Flock, but I thought I wanted something messy and complicated, colourful and chaotic. I had a picture of two women scrabbling about in a tangle of weeds and geraniums to show Keely, and another idea was to use a photo my friend Tracey took of her daughter’s budgie perched on a still life oil painting. I liked the idea of the painting being the pasture and the bird being the flock. When I arrived at Keely’s beautiful studio to see what she had come up with, she had a whole portfolio of covers to show me and they were all perfect. The ones using the images I had given her were exactly what I had hoped for, but she had also made these completely different, spare, wood-cut-like images of hens on grass—actual pasture, and an actual flock. It wasn’t what I had wanted at all and I didn’t want to let go of the other covers but it was so striking and so beautiful there wasn’t really a decision to make, it had to be the cover with the chickens.
Saige England, author of The Seasonwife (Bateman, 2023)
I was thrilled when Louise Russell at Bateman Books chose an artist woman she knew personally and professionally to design the cover of my debut novel. Keely worked collaboratively, responding with spirited enthusiasm to my idea of basing the cover on whaling scrimshaw. She worked day and night to create a compelling cover. It was a true labour of love. Keely, who loved the ocean, also showed the light. Wave upon wave. It’s all in the waves; each fine curve of blue water was drawn by hand. Today I turned back to my last email with Keely, where I thanked her for a cover that left me stunned. “My husband and sons also opened their mouths with wonder and joy when they saw your beautiful work,” I wrote back in March 2023. I wept with gratitude when I touched the cover for the first time. Today I wept with gratitude again.
Greg O’Brien, author of Don Binney: Flight Path (Auckland University Press, 2023)
Starting with my 2010 book about artist Graham Percy, A Micronaut in the Wide World, Keely produced covers for six of my books, most recently Don Binney: Flight Path (2023), as well as designing (brilliantly, like everything she did) an LP record cover for my pianist son Felix Bornholdt. What indescribably good luck to find ourselves within her creative orbit.
I suspect that designing (both inside and out) my 2019 book Always song in the water for AUP was a kind of homecoming for her, its oceanic narrative taking her back to a childhood spent on Aotea/Great Barrier Island and her life-long love of islands, coastline and salt water. That book (which in 2023 she re-designed in a bigger, even brighter revised edition to accompany an exhibition at the New Zealand Maritime Museum) and Don Binney: Flight Path offered a timely return to the Hauraki Gulf and the dizzying, Binney-bird compliant sky above it.
It was as if Keely set up shop/studio at the heart of the book-projects she loved and became a fundamental part of their innermost workings. I imagine her looking out at us from the rich inner space of her designs, from between the gutters and margins and through the tracking and leading of her always elegant typography. Alongside an acute visual sense, there was a tireless attentiveness to across-the-board detail. On one occasion, she suggested, gently, a reordering of the sentences in one of my paragraphs. She wasn’t one to be silent if things needed to be done differently. At the back of the Binney book I took my hat off to her: “As close reader, sounding board and collaborator, not to mention as this book’s designer, Keely O’Shannessy has greatly enhanced this production. I am much indebted to her.” An understatement, definitely. Having lost a singular force and gracious presence in the literary life of our nation, we now have to come to terms with the loss of a dear friend.
