Oak Spirits finished

I can't believe it! It's done..there was not too much work to do, but I was somewhat stuck...and busy, and stressed, and tired, and then away on vacation (thank goodness), and, for a few months now, pregnant. So I suppose I can console myself for being artistically dead for the whole summer.

I actually don't know that there is a lot of creative life in me right now, either. A hopeful sign is that last Sunday, while Bella and daddy were playing Lego upstairs, I wondered by the table where the dryads drawing had been laying abandoned for weeks and weeks, and I felt like I could maybe touch it up here and there. From there, and in a couple of evening sessions, I had completed it.

As I said in a previous post, the drawing is dedicated to the oak. According to ancient legends, oaks had not one but two resident spirits: a dryad, capable of leaving the tree and roaming into the forest, and an amadryad bound to the plant, united to it in life and death. Whenever a tree was cut, it was customary to call upon priests to perform rituals that would spare the dryad by sending her away. Things were sadly complicated in the case of oaks, whose amadryads could not be saved. Here you see the priests banishing one of the two creatures, while her sister is trapped and about to face the lumberers' axes. Sad, uh? What's with the black doves? That's a representation of another myth surrounding oak trees. Since oaks are sacred to Zeus and represent his power on earth, it was believed that the god would use it sometimes to communicate with humans. According to a greek legend, there once was a particular oak on  which two black doves coming from a far away land had made their nest. These doves would predict their future to pilgrims. Now, were the doves real birds like in this drawing? Hard to tell. One interpretation of the story is that the two black doves could have been priestesses that had reached ancient Greece either through a travel of their own or maybe by having been taken slaves from African shores. They were compared to doves because their sweet voices, as they were learning the local language, sounded strange, maybe difficult to understand, like the song of birds.

I found this tale quite intriguing, too, and gave the dove a central spot in the drawing...a tale of two couples of sisters, really.

Now to the next project, I think it will be the last one between now and the baby's birth, given my current productivity and the fact that I plan it to be a bit bigger than usual (adventure!). I'll keep you posted!

Ciao!