"The Stellar Child - The Starry Fool"

This small piece came out of reading Marly Youmans’ poetry in The Book of the Red King, with illustrations by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, an artist I have admired for a long time. He is probably responsible for me starting to play with paper maquettes, though he uses them in quite different ways than I do. The first two poems’ titles are combined in the title of this post, and were the pieces which inspired this drawing. The poems build through this beautiful book, and are magic and music.

Pen and watercolor - about 8 inches square.

Unfortunately the pens I used for this and several other pieces have proven quite “fugitive” - the colors fading in several I put on my studio walls for several bright summer months. I will have to adjust them with more permanent pigments before I do more than leave them in the watercolor pads where they were created.