Visions of Hope & Fear

9×12″ oil on paper
August 26, 2012

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Inspired by the following passage from The Light Princess by George MacDonald:

One fine summer day, a month after these her first adventures, during which time she had been very carefully watched, the princess was lying on the bed in the queen’s own chamber, fast asleep. One of the windows was open, for it was noon, and the day so sultry that the little girl was wrapped in nothing less ethereal than slumber itself.

The queen came into the room, and not observing that the baby was on the bed, opened another window. A frolicsome fairy wind, which had been watching for a chance of mischief, rushed in at the one window, and taking its way over the bed where the child was lying, caught her up, and rolling and floating her along like a piece of flue, or a dandelion-seed, carried her with it through the opposite window, and away. The queen went down-stairs, quite ignorant of the loss she had herself occasioned.

9×12″ oil on paper
August 30, 2012

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Inspired by a fairy tale by George MacDonald, in which the female character, Nycteris, unknowingly grows up in a dark cavern, never seeing light beyond a dim globe-shaped lamp. At this point in the story, at the age of 16, she accidentally ventures beyond the cave, and although it is night time, the experience of seeing the brightly lit moon for the first time sends her into a state of ecstasy. She, having never seen the moon, sees what we fail to see, since we so easily lose a sense for the extraordinary in what has become “ordinary.” Here is the passage:

She was in a dream of pleasant perplexity, of delightful bewilderment. She could not tell whether she was upon her feet or drifting about like the firefly, driven by the pulses of an inward bliss. But she knew little as yet of her inheritance.

Unconsciously she took one step forward from the threshold, and the girl who had been from her very birth a troglodyte, stood in the ravishing glory of a southern night, lit by a perfect moon….

8×10 oil on canvas
August 30, 2012

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Inspired by the following passage from The Golden Key by George MacDonald:

They stood on the level of the raging sea, looking towards the east. Across the waste of waters, against the bosom of a fierce black cloud, stood the foot of a rainbow, glowing in the dark.

“This indeed is my way,” said Mossy, as soon as he saw the rainbow, and stepped out upon the sea. His feet made no holes in the water. He fought the wind, and clomb the waves, and went on towards the rainbow.

16×16″ oil on canvas
August 30, 2012

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Inspired by the following passage from Lilith by George MacDonald:

The grass grew sweeter and its flowers more lovely and various as we went; the trees grew larger, and the wind fuller of messages.