Dragon on a Leaf: Mystery Solved!

Dear readers,

We have at last reached the end of one quest and have determined the identity of this piece, Autumn Gold, for which we have been searching since May:


The work is by Ursula Vernon; the owner of Amthrax's Lair was able to offer us this tip, and we have since contacted Ursula and confirmed it. You can visit Ursula Vernon's site, Metal and Magic, to see more of her work:

Sea Hag

Ursula Vernon is a freelance illustrator in the American South. When contacted about Autumn Gold, she remembered the piece with delight - it is a very old piece - and told us that she still has the tube of gold paint used to set the dragon infant on its leaf: "you never use that much gold." Her work ranges from the eerily beautiful to the decidedly odd, and you have probably come across some of it before. She has a knack for evoking wonder, though not always comfortable wonder:

Portrait of the Artist with a Crow in her Ribcage



Pregnant Mandrake

(Think John Donne: "Go and catch a falling star/Get with child a mandrake root...")


Woman with Bird Skull

Catch more of Ursula Vernon's work at her site. Her enthusiasm and vivacity for both art and life are terribly contagious ("Divorced, moved, moved back, kicked down, knocked around--but I'm ALIVE! And being an artist, being alive means that there's art!"), and as an artist she is relentlessly prolific. You can find dozens of intriguing works at her site, and somewhere over 600 if you look her up on deviantart (as ursulav). Well worth exploring her work. Those lines of text inscribed into the self-portrait, together with the whiteness of the crow, have me longing to meditate at length on that particular piece....

Dragon on a Leaf: Update!

A few of you who have been readers of this blog from the beginning may remember that in May we posted an inquiry about a painting of a baby dragon on a red leaf, asking if anyone had seen it or knew its title or artist. Today we received an e-mail from Rachel Schneider (many thanks!), who located a digital copy of the painting in the art collection called Amthrax's Lair on the University of Utah web server:


The painting is entitled Autumn, although the identity of the artist remains to us a mystery. Please comment or e-mail our editors if you know of the artist. In any case, here is the painting and now you can see why our chief editor loves it so much. It is like a haiku in watercolor, and so evocative of the small, accidental wonders we discover if we don't hurry too fast through the woods.

Rogue Black Holes

Rogue black holes...the highwaymen of the universe. I beg forgiveness of those astronomers or telescope enthusiasts who may be reading, but I had to post this bit of sensational prose from today's AP Science:

"The research findings from this week's annual meeting of U.S. astronomers range from blue orphaned baby stars to menacing "rogue" black holes that roam our galaxy, devouring any planets unlucky enough to be within their limited reach."

This is what I love about journalism, and I'm not even being ironic - only a journalist has the liberty to come up with such wildly raw statements.

Despite glib references to "post-menopausal stars" and similar cosmic effects, the article is definitely good reading: a quick scan of a host of recent discoveries and theories about the stars at which we gaze at night (or at which we don't get to gaze, if we live in the city and they're washed out by the light). Is there any emerging myth around the idea of the "black hole"?


It's a compelling idea - a hole in space in which the mass is so compact and the gravity so violent that once drawn in, nothing escapes, not even light. Hollywood has made several attempts at a mythology of the black hole, and David Brin tackled the black hole in a long science-fiction novel in the 1980s. The digital painting shown above is Black Hole by Jason Warren, the artist whose Solar Voyager site shows dramatic portraits of the universe's wonders.

The fascination with the heavens cannot have completely left us with the decline of funding to NASA; a young child I know went to Halloween recently dressed as a black hole, and eager to explain his costume (which to my mind was the most creative costume I saw that year).

Madeleine L'Engle used to comb through news of recent scientific discoveries for just such nuggets as this: black holes that wander wild through space and devour planets. She would have woven it into a story that was wondrous and strange and breathlessly new.

Such an anomaly as the black hole demands a good myth.

Ice Bears

If you were disappointed by New Line's Golden Compass adaptation, here is a gift to lighten and brighten your spirits - a portrait of Dulac's from the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London - the same Dulac who did so many beautiful paintings for The Thousand and One Nights and other texts. I found this on the Endicott blog, which is buzzing busily lately - definitely check out the recent posts there. Terri Windling & company have been posting everything from fairy tale costumes to art galleries to the covers of recent French retellings of old tales...their blog is itself a museum and a wunderkammern filled with bright and beautiful curiosities, or oddities. Their Dec 27 entry highlights a showing of work by Dulac and his contemporaries in London. I am trying to find out what story the illustration above belongs to.

It makes me think of Margaret Cavendish's Blazing New World, when the captive lady is rescued by creatures that walk upright but have the shape of bears. A memorable passage from a seldom remembered book - or at least seldom remembered until very recently. I have no idea if Cavendish was reprinted at all in Dulac's generation. Perhaps the illustration belongs instead to some Andersen fairy tale that I missed as a child. Those bears and that lady beneath the stars are beautiful, yes? Sing out if you know what story the image belongs to.

Although it would be hard to beat the efforts of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, here is a New Year's challenge to the few and the brave who are listening in to this blog and reading Dante's Heart: wherever you are, get some collection together or contest for fairy tale and imaginative art in your own town. I think that even in the smallest and most allegedly drab of towns there are a few born artists, and if there are not, there are at least an entire flock of children who have not lost the talent of wondering, and they might come up with such work as would surprise whole academies, given the chance. Strike up a league with whatever local galleries, libraries, universities, or museums are readily available, post word of a contest, and see what happens. In the wake of the financial successes of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, the studios are pouring films with fantastical themes and imagery into our waking eyes; are we going to leave it up to Hollywood to give us our dreams? Any town on this continent or overseas can produce beautiful or provoking art that speaks to the heart more loudly.

If every reader of Dante's Heart was to assemble some kind of gallery before the year 2008 was out, what beauty and imagination we'd all be wondering at by next Christmas!

Dante's Heart Issue 1 is up!

Dear readers,

The first issue of Dante's Heart, "Water into Wine," is now available at www.dantesheart.com. Take a look - we have work there from some wonderful artists and writers. The title is inspired - besides the Wedding at Cana - by G. K. Chesterton's statement, in Orthodoxy, that "fairy stories make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water." That is an especially good thing to remember at this time of year amid the commercial rush and stress.

Take a look at our first issue, and drop us a comment here or a note at editors@dantesheart.com to let us know what you think. Enjoy - this is our holiday gift to you -

Cheers,
Daniel

Daniel Fusch
Editor, Dante's Heart

The Names of Planets

A few years late, I am finally catching up on Gene Wolfe's
Short Sun trilogy - which is deeply poignant. Noticing that the two planets in the story are called "Blue" and "Green," I was shocked at the simplicity of the names. I imagined the first travelers to these worlds seeing their colors from far above them. "But that's nothing to name a planet," I thought with some irritability at those pioneers. Then I stopped and thought about the name of our own planet, and of all its companions. We have forgotten what most of the names in the solar system mean, and because we are not contemporaries of Caesar, "Mars" and "Jupiter" are names that sound very exotic to us. But actually, our ancestors, both ancient and immediate, have named the heavenly bodies, from the nearest to the sun to the farthest away: Messenger, Love, Soil (that's the one we're on), War, Father of the Gods, Eater of Children, Sky, Ocean, and Death. Are these names any more or less wise than "Blue" and "Green"? Or any more or less beautiful?

Love and War are understandable enough, from the physical appearance of those two worlds: one shining and radiant, the other brooding and red in our sky. These are names like Blue and Green, just with one further layer of symbol and meaning. Death is also a logical enough name, for a satellite so far from the sun that it must be cold and dead indeed. Scientists named Neptune for its ocean-like color...so actually, we did name a planet Blue, except that we named it Ocean.

But I ask you: Saturn? The most beautiful of all our worlds? We named it He Eats His Children? What injustice. And yet...if it is true that those glorious rings that circle Saturn are the remains of tiny, tiny worlds pulled apart by Saturn's gravity, then our planet Saturn did eat its children.

I am still trying to decide if these were wise names or foolish ones. In either case, what we name our worlds does indicate a lot about us. I am glad, in any case, to be living on Soil, and not on a planet named Death or Eater of Children.

Guennol Lioness

From today's news:

"NEW YORK (AFP) - A tiny and extremely rare 5,000-year-old white limestone sculpture from ancient Mesopotamia sold for 57.2 million dollars in New York on Wednesday, smashing records for both sculpture and antiquities. The carved Guennol Lioness, measuring just over eight centimeters (3 1/4 inches) tall, was described by Sotheby's auction house as one of the last known masterworks from the dawn of civilization remaining in private hands."

A staggering price - though the sculpture is beautiful. It reminds me of the jaguar gods of Mezoamerica. See its grace and strength, and the beauty with which it was shaped. 5,000 years old, it is as old as the wheel: something that staggers the mind.

But who, in their astonishment at the beauty of this early, early piece of human art, spent over 57 million dollars? I was about to say "I hope the buyer knows the story behind this Guennol Lioness," only now that I look again, I realize it is beautiful enough to need no story.

Is 57 million dollars the monetary value of an ancient myth?

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071206/ts_afp/entertainmentartusantiquityauction