Poetry and Journals

I am one of those singularly useless college graduates in this day and age - I have a double B.A. in English and history, subjects not much valued by the modern business world where one must basically have a 'trade'.  I've never regretted my choice of majoring in liberal arts, and I'm celebrating that choice today in a way, by using one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets on a journal page.

The poem is "The Stolen Child," by Irish poet William Butler Yeats.  You can find the full text of the poem here. The poem is basically acknowledging the legends about fairies stealing children from their human families, which I think may still be used as a benign threat in the British Isles ("watch out or the fairies will get you", that sort of thing).  But it's done in a beautiful way that I love, and Yeats is a master of using language to create images that stick with you.  Many people are familiar with him as a writer of poems about the Irish conflicts, rather than the more mythological work.  

Several musical artists have set the poem to music, including the Waterboys and Loreena McKennitt.  I like McKennitt's version but really prefer the Waterboys, which you can find here.  It's from their album "Fisherman's Blues."

Enough of the lecture.

I started the page with my usual covering up with scraps of vintage paper.  One reason I do this, if I'm going to paint a page, is to strengthen the page itself.  I then attempted to use one of my malfunctioning paint sprayers to start a yellow layer, which didn't quite work.   This would be Primary Yellow.

I then added various layers of other colors, a light Cobalt Blue, Permanent Rose, and Titanium White (I use traditional acrylic and water colors, by the way - not paint that comes in little bottles).  The stencils are from a set I found at a discount store, which I think work quite well, and I also used a strip of stencil waste (punchinella).  

And there it sat for a couple of days.  Then for some reason I decided to add a green border (Soho Urban's Forest Green) around the edge of the pages.

And I liked it.  I thought it added some definition.  By this time I had decided that the theme would indeed be "The Stolen Child," and I found some images I could use on Etsy, as well as clip art sheets from Lunagirl's shop, fairy wings in particular.  

The mother and child image was pretty much all white and I decided to color it in with pencil to give it more color.  I imagined the child was dressed in some semblance of Scottish tartan but I've no clue of the clan that's supposed to be represented.  I added wings to the woman, implying that she's a fairy come to take the child away.  I also added some other embellishments

Here's a closeup of the woman so you can perhaps see the penciled in color a bit better.

And finally, the finished piece with a quote from the poem.  The font used is Chiller, not sure where I got it from but it's a free download, virus-free.

What do you think?

later,

lin