Visit my Website for all the blurbs, excerpts and news!!

Visit my Website for all the blurbs, excerpts and news!!
Visit my Website for all the blurbs, excerpts and news!!

Wednesday 8 April 2020

The Art of The Elder Man (Coming Tomorrow!)

Uncovering and divulging  an outlandish conspiracy will put a hard bump into any journalist’s career, and Armin can only blame himself when he’s dispatched from Frankfurt’s skyscrapers into the depths of rural France on the unglamorous job of writing about a cobbing workshop.

Natural building is messy, dirty and sweaty work, but it has its consolations. For example, Van, the greying but undeniably hot master cobber teaching the workshop. Sure, the man is a hopeless tree-hugger, with embarrassing notions about ancient folklore and religions, but he’s still worth a week-long fling, right?

When Van is revealed in all his majesty and power as a long forgotten forest god, however, the week-long fling might well become entangled with eternity, on the edge between life, death, madness, and immortality.


-:- 

I can't wait for tomorrow, and the release of The Elder Man, a story that I have worked on for well over a year. It all began even longer ago, with this drawing I made of Danila Kovalev in January of 2018.
"Cernunnos (1)" 
(model, Danila Kovalev)
pencil drawing
© Katherine Wyvern

It was a drawing of Cernunnos, god of the forest and keeper of the gates of the underworld in Gaulish mythology. This drawing was just an homage to the beauty and magic of the woods around my garden, but it slowly became so deeply rooted into my imagination that Cernunnos finally found his way into one of my notorious "short, light stories" and turned it into a wonderfully deep and textured tapestry of wild nature and ancient magic. Since then I made more drawings for this book, and they became part of the storytelling for me. I have gathered them here, and I hope they express some of the love and awe I feel for Van and his woods.


"Cernunnos (2)"

(model, Henry Ian Cusick) 
Pencil drawing, digital color 
© Katherine Wyvern
-:-
"The Great God Pan (1)"
(model, Henry Ian Cusick)
pencil drawing, digital effects
© Katherine Wyvern
 -:-

"The Great God Pan (2)"
(model, Henry Ian Cusick)
pencil drawing, digital effects
© Katherine Wyvern

-:-
“Why the antlered man? Who is it?” repeated Armin, a little confused, looking at Van.
Van shrugged. “He’s … Amun, and Silvanus and Pan, and the Leshy and Veles and Svyatibor  … even the Minotaur, perhaps. There is a picture of him as old as fifteen thousand years in a cave in the Ariege, la grotte des Trois-Frères. The Sorcerer. Prancing fellow with antlers and a thumping big dong.”
Every woman in the room, including the young girls, giggled.
He grimaced theatrically. “Sorry. All these old horned males. What can I say?”
“Anyway, some would say he’s the Devil, too, and Baphomet. And lately, just the Horned God. It all got twisted about since the Christians started messing with the old deities. And the Wiccans just made one big stew of it all to cover all the bases and be on the safe side. They may not be wrong however. In France, the Gauls came to call him Cernunnos or Carnonos or Cerunincos, which all simply mean the horned one or the antlered one. I suppose we might go with Cernunnos.”

“Wherever you look, there was always a god of the forest, the earth, the water… a god of low places, valleys, sources, meadows. His trees were always small trees. Healing trees. The willow, the elder, the rowan. Not a sky god. Not a war god. He was also, as often as not, a god of agriculture and fertility. And death and healing, even resurrection.  Fall, winter, and spring, the seasons. Nature again. It was easy in the old days to believe in such a divinity. And it was wise to pay tribute to him. Forests, fields, death, rebirth, the cycles and forces of nature were rather more … central.”
 -:-

"Stag Night"
pencil drawing, digital effects 
© Katherine Wyvern
-:-
"At the head of the bed was sculpted a huge tree, which rose from a tangle of roots and interwoven grasses or creepers and spread on the walls and under the ceiling.
It took a sort of knack, a subtle shift in vision and a certain familiarity with Van’s twisting and fractal designs, to realize that the tree was actually two slender stags, rearing up belly-to-belly, muzzles raised, legs grappling. Their massive leafy antlers spread up and out like a petrified fountain and ended in a foamy, lacy, semiformal trellis of finely tooled flower heads.
The stags might be fighting, but seeing how their long cocks and serpentine tongues were entwined in two labyrinthine knots, they might also be doing something else entirely.
Armin blinked, dumbfounded, then blinked again, and uncannily, the tree was just a tree once more..."
-:-

"Cernunnos (3)"
pencil drawing, digital effects 
© Katherine Wyvern
-:-
“There has always been something mystical about the stag and his antlers, in all the old Indo-European cultures. The stag was important enough to have his own constellation, roughly where modern astronomers place Ophiuchus. The Celts put it nicely, saying that the stag carried the solar disk in his crown. His antlers and his strength are greatest in the autumn, they are lost in the winter and emerge again in the spring. He incarnates the death of nature and its awakening. He and Cernunnos are avatars of the fall, of the death of nature and its rebirth. Cycles again.”
-:-
 I am immensely grateful toe Evernight Publishing and Jay Aheer of Simply Defined Art for including my moon cycle illustration in the cover of the book.


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