or A TRIBUTE TO ALECTOR
11”x14” watercolor and ink, 2014-2015 • Print Available! • Click for full view.
Original is for sale! Drop me a line if interested.
A personal piece I sketched out almost a year ago, which I’ve been nursing along ever since. Unlike many of my works, this one’s meaning changed a lot over the course of its creation. At the time I drafted it I was writing a novel where wolves were the protectors of a forest, much to the protagonist’s surprise, and I was also inspired by Alector Fencer’s plant spirit character, so that was where the wolf spirit came from. I toyed with the notion of elk and deer as being enemies of the forest, since they eat it after all, but as I finished the piece I realized that the guardian/enemy dynamic was not what the picture was about.
That wolf spirit is not a wood spirit at all, but the Death of Deer. The Death of Deer looks like a wolf, fittingly enough, but it is made of plants and leaves, representing the circle of life as the deer’s body returns to the earth to provide nutrients for the plants which it consumed while it was alive. I can only imagine this deer had a harder time than most letting go, which was what prompted the personal attention of the Death of Deer.
