Climbing/Excelsior

This entry for illustration friday was inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's ode to untethered (possibly unhinged) heroism, Excelsior, the first stanza of which reads:

The  shades of night were falling fast

As through an Alpine village passed

A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,

A banner with the strange device -

                                           Excelsior!

Oh dear, I see I have left the exclamation point off...in any case, I was introduced to this poem in The Thurber Carnival, James Thurber being a domestic diety in my childhood home. You can see Thurber's own interpretation here. I think I made the climber a fair-haired Englishman because I had in the back of my mind the Scott expedition member Captain Oates who famously said "I am just going out and I may be some time". If you would like to see some actual icy expanses, Transient Lives has posted a virtual tour of a glacier in Patagonia.

Edit: Avid reader has commented that I left the L out of the banner. It was not intended to make the piece more editorial and is in fact an error...I will have to see if my conscience forces me to fix it in the course of the day, or I leave it as a happy accident. [Fixed]

St. George and the Dragon

Here's a very old illustration I did as a card many years ago. I suppose what appeals to me about the time of year is an English/European world that exists in literature in which pagan motifs were incorporated into the newly dominant paradigm. One example is the chorus of the Holly and the Ivy, the original being:

O the rising of the sun,

The running of the deer,

The playing of the merrier gods,

Sweet singing all in the choir.

Merrier gods being changed to "merry organ" to fit it in to the new religion. 

But I love the borderlands.

Celebrating

Well, the town of Oakland, California is pretty happy right now. This illustration is part of a series I am working on for The Monthly and has to do with a grandmother dancing in the snow at Christmas time, but it seems appropriate (there was, in fact, dancing in the street last night).