i danced with the waterspouts
silvia. 2023.
My entry for “Folio Book Illustration Award 2023”, a contest hosted by Folio Society. The illustration was to be ispired by the short story The flyers of Gy, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Mixed media watercolor and digital. After the contest, I realized I could fix a lot of things in the painting; below you can see the before and after. The passage that inspired the painting is this one:
“On a clear day, in the sunlight, with everything lying down there below, far away... Or in a high wind, in a storm—out over the sea, that’s where I like best to fly. Over the sea in stormy weather. When the fishing boats run for land, and you have it all to yourself, the sky full of rain and lightning, and the clouds under your wings. Once off Emer Cape I danced with the waterspouts... It takes everything to fly. Everything you are, everything you have. And so if you go down, you go down whole. And over the sea, if you go down, that’s it, who’s to know, who cares? I don’t want to be buried in the ground.”
