Illustration Friday - Wind

Moving Forward

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
That I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
in the ponds broken off from the sky
my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

- Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)

This is a return engagement of an image I posted about a year ago. I decided that if I played around with the colors a bit, I could submit it to Penelope's Black & Orange Contest, and with the windswept mane, tail, and hair, it would also suit this week's IF topic.

Happy Halloween!

(Illustrator & Photoshop)

Illustration Friday - Ghost

Trees in the Garden

Ah in the thunder air
how still the trees are!

And the lime-tree, lovely and tall, every leaf silent
hardly looses even a last breath of perfume.

And the ghostly, creamy coloured little tree of leaves
white, ivory white among the rambling greens
how evanescent, variegated elder, she hesitates on the green grass
as if, in another moment, she would disappear
with all her grace of foam!

And the larch that is only a column, it goes up too tall to see:
and the balsam-pines that are blue with the grey-blue blueness of
things from the sea,
and the young copper beech, its leaves red-rosy at the ends
how still they are together, they stand so still
in the thunder air, all strangers to one another
as the green grass glows upwards, strangers in the silent garden.

-D.H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930)

The sky changes so quickly here...from acid blue with the trees glowing neon in the late afternoon light, to grey with huge rushing clouds that stampede fiercely across the hilltops. Autumn is Nature's give and take...She gives so much visual beauty that one can't help but feel an inexplicable joy, but that joy is tempered with a sadness as each rainstorm and gust of wind denudes the trees and brings us closer to winter...when we will join those bare ghosts as they wait for the return of green.

(acrylic on 6" x 8" canvas)

Illustration Friday - Trouble

Storm Warnings

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of grey unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.

-Adrienne Rich (1929 - )

The trouble here is not having enough time to paint and read and interact as much as I would like, but somehow I did manage this painting.
(acrylic on 12" x 16" canvas)