Mixed metaphors

I’m working on the cover of next year’s Lunar Calendar which is both fun and daunting, since I have great freedom. My so-called personal work is always an amalgam of whatever is cluttering my drawing table/mind at the moment. With Rickshaw Girl bringing good news, I have been revisiting all the scads of reference material for that project that went unused. In short, I decided to do a Hindu goddess/chimera…part tiger and part queen, since I just finished reading about Mabel Stark, the famous female tiger trainer from the 20’s. During a break, I opened up the local paper to a photo of a monastery in Myanmar. The Cyclone Nargis had made rubble all around this enormous shining, smiling statue of a goddess, maybe Buddhist, hard to tell. A woman, dwarfed by the statue, lay prone on the empty floor, praying. How else to cope with such devastation?

I returned to my drawing. It needs to be colorful and exuberant in the face of dark news. I’m going to play around with different backgrounds and layers of decoration. Stay tuned.

Today I made a card for my mum, Jeanne.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mum!