Wild Light

From reader and correspondent Timothy Ladd, a sonnet.

——— Wild Notes ———

The charming cardinal is our year-round friend,
Warbling wild notes unnoticed in the pines,
While other gaudy plumes will have us spend
Our greater powers on their rarer signs.
Content yourselves with easy arcs of swallows,
Twittering till the shallow end of day.
The jay will startle. Every starling follows
Raucously its twin. House sparrows say
Their feeble thoughts in hordes so loud
It drives the finch away. And we, bereft,
Hear feathers of a nightingale in cloud
Overhead, find down an eagle must have left,
And disregard all glory we have heard
Come streaming from that scarlet bird.

Artist John Berkey has died, one of the great illustrators of the last half-century.

He was honored several times by his fellow artists, but was mostly ignored by SF fans, despite his influence on our vision of the future, spaceflight in particular.

I’ll miss his painterly images.

One of the great animal artists, here’s a bee painting by Edward Julius Detmold.

See a bee collision.

A sketch from another project:

Reflected stars whisper of eternity, watched silently while counting down the night.

Buy a print of this image.

See an afternoon of contrasts.

“Gustave Courbet’s paintings make me feel as if nuzzled by the wet nose of a calf.” — Edgar Degas

Below is Male and Female Deer in the Woods by the rebellious Courbet.

Enjoy a guest post by writer Anne Harris.

Anne writes fantasy, science fiction and, as Jessica Freely, alternative romance. Her most recent publication, Hero, is available from Torquere Books. She also mentors graduate students in Seton Hill University’s Writing Popular Fiction program.

Read her blog Friskbiskit.

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Being Outside
by Anne Harris

It’s early spring in Michigan and I’m beginning to spend time outside
again.

Every winter, my world reduces to interior spaces. Oh, I still go outside,
of course. I still take a moment, here and there, to appreciated a network
of naked oak branches against a flat gray sky, or the reflection of the moon
on the snow on a clear winter night when the cold itself is a presence:
deadly, mysterious and seemingly eternal. I savor the sunny days any way I
can manage it. I try to take a walk in a snowy wood at least once each
season.

But, for the most part, I am indoors, and I don’t care for it very much. I
find there’s something stressful about being confronted with straight lines
and right angles at every turn. Perfection, precision, absoluteness. They
give a misleading impression of what life is like: either/or. And life is
manifestly both/and.

I don’t think the human eye is particularly suited to the carpentered
environment. The human heart either, for that matter. We are animals, after
all. At least, that’s the explanation I’ve come up with for why, when
winter finally breaks and I can once again sit outside in my back yard for
hours at a time, or take off for the lake for the day, my eyes are so
grateful. They are. They soak in the broken lines, the curves, the spikes,
the clumps and bumps, and I literally feel them relax. And then I relax.
Now, what’s outside matches what’s inside. All around me is reassuring
evidence that chaos, multiplicity and disorder are not only normal, but also
functional and beautiful. I feel better about myself and the world.

No living thing is a straight line. We are all bent, in one way or another,
and better for it.

Happy spring.

I’ll be showcasing some of my favorite wildlife illustrators every once in a while.

Below is a color plate by W. Heath Robinson from a favorite of the illustrated books I own, The Song of the English (1909) by Rudyard Kipling.

Below is an illustration for the pulp story “The Sky Terror” by the too-little-known artist, writer and designer Hannes Bok (1914 - 1964), one of the artists in the Lovecraft book I’ll be in.

Sky terror indeed. Most wasps are beneficial to humans.

I’ve received my copies of the latest Whisper in the Woods Nature Journal featuring my work, and it looks great. In addition to the front and back cover, there is a portfolio of 17 of my wildlife images, including the diaphanous snail below.

I’ve been getting lots of great feedback, and have been invited to exhibit and give a presentation in northern Michigan this summer. Contact me to get a signed copy of the issue, or subscribe at the Whisper in the Woods website.

Buy a print of this image.

See my illustration for Federico Garcia Lorca’s great poem, “The Encounters of an Adventurous Snail”.

H.P. Lovecraft must have been impressed with spiders.  In ‘The Shadow Out of Time‘ (published 1936) arachnids are the last life left on the planet.

Here’s another quote from that story: “After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world.”

I’m almost finished signing the signature sheets for an upcoming limited edition art book: “Artists Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft” published by Centipede Press.

I’ll be in great company along with artwork by H.R. Giger, Hannes Bok (here’s a nice fantasy centipede by Bok), and many others. Should be a cool book. I’m doing a little painting along with each signature.