Literary Types - Winter Works and Poetry

Only a handful of literary references tied in to the Winter Works collection, and these were bits of poems, rather than novels.

The first comes from the poem The Sunset, Woven of Soft Lights, by Katharine Lee Bates.

The sunset, woven of soft lights
And tender colors, lingers late,
As looking back on all day's dreary plights,
Compassionate;

One can imagine the Master Weaver arranging the dust particles in the atmosphere, the cloud positions for bouncing off the pink and salmon rays down to the leaves of the trees and the soft grasses to create a beautiful tapestry every evening. Artists are forever trying to convey the interlacing of the elements that produce both majesty and unbearable softness in a perfect setting sun.

Next up is good ole Wordsworth. You’ve heard the first line, “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, but it is the following lines that this next painting reminded me of:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

The flowers, in this case, were not daffodils, but coreopsis, I think.

Lastly, I painted Salmon Skies for this collection and still enjoy its cool blues and reds, but I took this motif and painted a larger work, entitled The Water Wore a Mantle, inspired by the Sara Teasdale poem:

Then for an hour the water wore a mantle
Of tawny gold and mauve and misted turquoise.

Here is the OG 8x10, Salmon Skies

You can see these (minus The Water Wore a Mantle, because it was completed afterwards) in the Winter Works collection while it is on the website. Is there a poem that speaks to you of sunsets, lakes, mountains, the ocean… Please share!