The Origin of the Sacred

He climbs onto the bed and lays his head on my lap. He says, “Here I am at the origin of the world. I don’t understand why women are not considered innately sacred in our society.”

 

Celebrating Women

I will be a vendor at the Celebrating Women event in Prince George’s County at Marietta House Museum. I will have my novel and coloring book available.

Red August copies are $14.95, the coloring book is $8.99 – descriptions and photos at the end of this post.

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I’m lucky enough to know two other fantastic area women artists who will also be vending at the event, Bridget of BDevlinDesigns, and Mary of Scribbles In Stitches.

The event is meant to showcase the talents of women artists and entrepreneurs.

From the website event page:

September 17th – 11am-6pm

Celebrate women of many talents – artists, and entrepreneurs.  Shop female owned food, wine and craft vendors.  View artists’ demonstrations and enjoy readings, plays, music and more. $5 per person entry – children 5 and under are free.

Please come by and support area artists and businesses!

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Red August Description.

What if you found out that you were descended from a long line of clandestine fighters, and that your family was still at war? Or that the love of your life was something other than human? August Archer thinks she’s a normal teenage girl—even though she has been having disturbing and erotic dreams about wolves lately. Still grieving over the loss of her bookish, charming father, and wondering over his final gift of a red hooded cloak, August is uprooted from her New York City apartment to a tiny town in Maryland, and the rambling Victorian house where he grew up. There she meets a wise woman with a gift for herbal medicine, the gentle old man who keeps the house in repair and the grounds thriving, and her new neighbor: an enigmatic, irresistibly fascinating man who refuses to talk to her, yet who seems to know her better than she knows herself, and fuels her most intense romantic fantasies. But it’s when August begins to coax her feisty Scottish grandmother out of her self-imposed catatonia that a strange tale of werewolves and hunters emerges—one in which the man of her dreams may be her family’s oldest enemy—in this modern-day telling of the Red Riding Hood story.

 

Fairies and Goblins

I was looking around the internet for an illustration style to filter a photograph.  I was specifically seeking an Arthur Rackham filter.  Anybody who loves fairy paintings as much as I do has probably heard of Arthur Rackham.  In searching for that, I came across this:

Pretty sexy huh?  (Source)

Which is actually an image of a Kinuko Craft painting done in the Arthur Rackham style, from Playboy in the late 1970s.  Yes, Playboy!  Anyway, this illustration was done for something called “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti, which it turns out, is a poem I’ve never heard of.  Below is an excerpt (it’s really long, y’all) and you can see the whole thing here.

Morning and evening

Maids heard the goblins cry:

“Come buy our orchard fruits,

Come buy, come buy:

Apples and quinces,

Lemons and oranges,

Plump unpeck’d cherries,

Melons and raspberries,

Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches,

Swart-headed mulberries,

Wild free-born cranberries,

Crab-apples, dewberries,

Pine-apples, blackberries,

Apricots, strawberries;—

All ripe together

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I’ve no reason to share this other than the fact I thought it was pretty neat.  But it also illustrates how the internet can derail your focus!  Even if a clear path is in front of me, I am stopping to look at all of the fruits and flowers along the way.  Also, I once wrote to Kinuko Craft in the 1990s when the internet was a lot newer. I had found a copy of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” that she had illustrated and I was absolutely ENCHANTED by her work.  An eager painter and artist, I wanted to tell her how much her work touched me.  She wrote back.  I wish I still had that computer with that hard drive with that email archive.  That year I had emails from the plus size model Emme, and artists Amy Brown and Jessica Galbreth – both who were newly artists at the time.  Also, that was back when ebay was new and reasonably priced, so it was easy to find good artists there that were selling their own work and weren’t some kind of import, mass-market artwork.

Some Favorite Things

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love to write down things that make life a full, happy, sensual experience.  It doesn’t hurt to throw some watercolor on there, too!