My little booklet, “Goddesses of River, Sea and Moon” is now available to buy on Folksy here. It covers the mythology of 24 goddesses from around the world, each with a detailed pen and ink illustration. And now I’m working on a colour version!
Author: Alexi
Forest Inspiration
I stumbled on this inspiring film, Falling, directed and performed by Ayelen Liberona. It explores the natural world combining forest, water and dance in a strange and interesting way :)
Whispers from the forest
I am, once again, in the forest. An aqua forest… of dreams… caught up in an entanglement of roots, alert to the breath and whisper of rock, of clod, of underground river.
As in the poem, Lost, by David Wagnor, I must listen… stand still… let the forest find me.
Lost
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.— David Wagoner
New Year and change. Letting the silt of the old year settle; lingering in shifting currents. I took a wander through a nearby wood, the sun, bright, cold and clear through tangled hands of branches, taut and white like a drum in the sky. A forest seeded in my mind…
Before Christmas, I listened to a play by Kneehigh Theatre on Radio 4 called “The Wild Bride”. The story was based on the fairy tale, The Handless Maiden and an overview of the tale can be read on the theatre website here.
In the tale a poor forester accidently sells his daughter to the Devil. When she goes feral and becomes a wild thing in the forest, I began to listen a bit more intently;
“Her dreams became deep rooted and full of forest”.
Wild or feral people, animals and characters intrigue me right now:
– The Thing in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast… “something human that stood dappled with leaf-shaped shadows, a child, with its thick hair hacked off close to its head and the face freckled like a bird’s egg. The body, slender, indeed thin, appeared, when the child began to move, to be without weight.”
– the wild child in David Malouf‘s An Imaginary Life… “He has not yet captured his individual soul out of the universe about him. His self is outside him, its energy distributed among the beasts and birds whose life he shares, among leaves, water, grasses, clouds, thunder – whose existence he can be at home in because they hold, each of them, some particle of his spirit.”
Perhaps they represent a freer, more primitive self, a closeness to the wild spirit and nature we once had millenia back. Perhaps they simply remind us of the untamed child of our own past, I may have been somehow closer to nature then.
I took a biro, a large sheet of brown paper and inspired by Eva Jospin, doodled a forest. Here is my first Forest on Brown Paper and a photoshop-inverted one because I love blue so much. Wild child sketches follow.
More Hares
I still seem to be into hares right now. Here are my two Silver Spirit Hare board paintings on sale in Retail Therapy in Brighton.
Havergate Hare
While on Havergate Island last year, I had plenty of opportunities to watch, study and photograph the island’s hares. It was a pleasure.
A full moon shimmered on the waters of The Narrows.
On returning, I drew this picture, called “Havergate Hare”. It is now a greetings card available on my Folksy shop :)
Dancing Heart Bowl and My New Folksy Shop
I’ve just opened my Folksy shop and am begining to fill it with cards, paintings and papier mache bowls. My latest addition is this “Dancing Heart” bowl painted with acrylic paints and metallic, acrylic inks that give it a shimmering finish:
I hope to get more cards into my website shop, soon. Any requests, just contact me :)
Swan and Moon
Sifting through my blog images my attention was caught by my swan illustration created for the inside of a bottle that was tossed into the Atlantic last year. I haven’t heard from anyone who may have found it – yet. Anyway, I thought about the swan image and decided to redraw the picture without the words and experiment with it in photoshop, overlaying it with a photograph of a misty sunset over the River Adur.
Here is the result:
My thoughts turn to why I drew swans flying at night in the first place. I recall that they migrate at night, navigating by the stars. Am I right? Are they migrating now?
A quick check confirms that some swans migrate. They fly by day and by night and when they fly by night, they learn to navigate by the stars. Mute swans were sacred to the Greek God, Apollo, as the bird was known as a symbol of light.
I am also reminded of the lovely Celtic myth of Aengus, the God of Dreams, who falls in love with a girl he sees in a dream. After much searching the girl is found and she is called Caer. Each alternate year Caer becomes a swan. Aengus can only claim her if he can identify her amongst a hundred swans which is what he does. But to join her, he too transforms himself into a swan. They then fly away together singing such beautiful music that all who hear them succumb to a deep sleep.
Psyche Painting
Here is a new wooden board painting, called Psyche because of the butterflies in it. (You can read the myth of Psyche and Eros here.) She is the latest in my series of Goddess paintings.
Below are others from the series: Abundance, Soulful, Nurture and Moongazer. They have all gone to loving homes in the big wide world.
River Goddess Booklets
I’m returning to my River Goddess long term project. I would like to explore it in all sorts of media -more paining, photography, video, words, movement. Yesterday I was playing with some of my images in photoshop and had the idea of making booklets to either print or make as rough artworks in themselves. Instead of buying A5 sketchbooks or making them from scratch, I’ve decided to use some A5 brochures I found and remake them into artbooks.
Here are some sample pages:
I’ve come up with some interesting images I thought I could make into cards as well:
To Feel Again
Feel. I feel I have to start again
within my field of feeling.
I have brought down fences and the hedges are small,
I can see over chaos.
The pages of my life hang like tattered sails,
I could dance like the warm-cool breeze and they would flutter
with me.
My words have not left yet
nor the breeze, free voice of the barmy night
now the sun has gone so I cannot reach over for it.
I feel that I must begin again
within my field of feeling.
And there is promise and potential in the air
pregnant as a thought,
wordless, small to bursting.
My words like waves washed away something smooth,
a shore beneath the gulls of night.
We are beneath a gibbous moon whose pull is not enough.
I lounge and long in the backwash of this moon’s shadow.
If only I could capture this night like a moth in a jar
and savour it in my field of feeling
By day, it is alive with moths
This night is a book open in the breeze, a half forgotten chapter,
Words hang unsung, a voice unuttered, a body unstirred in an
unawakened dream.
Perhaps it is time to wake within my field of feeling
remake where words left off
and all the jars I couldn’t fill, the jars of night and stars
and milky ways and the sounds of storm petrels,
now the night is here and the moon, a nickel.
The night is bent over like a woman in indigo, a desert dreamer.
She picks her way through fields of sea campion and hares,
she dares to look between the papers and words,
the body and head,
the schisms, rifts,
the dichotomies, the hesitations, confusions, reflections.
She looks between into the field of feeling
where the rich grasses rustle
and the trees in breezes dare to speak
And she looks to the open book,
the sails beneath the nickel moon
and pulls over the blue veil til horizons meet
and from there, in the field of feeling,
she begins the dream.
