Behind the Russian Church there is an abyss.
The moss and the rubbish are slippery and jagged old tins glitter at the bottom. For hundreds of years they have piled up higher and higher against a long dark-red house without windows. The red house crawls round the rock and it is very significant that it has no windows. Behind the house is the harbour, a silent harbour with no boats in it. The little wooden door in the rock below the church is always locked.
Hold your breath when you run past it, I told Poyu. Otherwise Putrefaction will come out and catch you. Poyu always has a cold. He can play the piano and holds his hands in front of him as if he were afraid of being attacked or was apologizing to someone. I always scare him and he follows me because he wants to be scared.
- Sculptor's Daughter by Tove Jansson
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I made my golden calf in the arbour because it was a pagan place and a circle is always a good setting for sculpture.
It was very difficult to get the legs to stay upright but in the end they did and I nailed them to the socle just to make sure. Sometimes I stood still, listening for the first rumble of the wrath of God. But so far he had said nothing. His great eye just looked right down into the arbour through the hole between the tops of the spruce trees. At last I had got him to show some interest.
- Sculptor's Daughter by Tove Jansson
#dailydrawing #tovejansson
God lived on the hill above the rock-garden and there was a forbidden cart up there. At sunset he spread out like a mist over the house and the field. He could make himself quite small and creep in everywhere in order to see what one was doing and sometimes he was only a great big eye. Moreover he looked just like Grandfather.
We raised our voices in the wilderness and were continually disobedient because God so likes to forgive sinners. God forbade us to gather manna under the laburnum tree but we did all the same. Then he sent worms up from the earth to eat up the manna. But we went on being disobedient and we still raised our voices.
- Sculptor's Daughter by Tove Jansson
#dailydrawing #tovejansson
24x30 canvas A weathered steer skull fixed against a wagon wheel, drawn in graphite, charcoal, and ink, evokes the grit and resolve of westward migration. The skull stands as a quiet emblem of endurance, sacrifice, and survival, while the wheel anchors the piece in motion and passage. Westbound ’49 references the year many headed west in search of promise, capturing the stark beauty and cost of that journey in restrained black and white.
Grandfather was a clergyman and used to preach to the King. Once, before his children and his children's children and his children's children's children covered the face of the earth, Grandfather came to a long field which was surrounded by forests and hills so that it looked like Paradise. At one end it opened out into a bay for his descendants to bathe in.
Then Grandfather thought, here will I dwell and multiply, for verily this is the Land of Canaan.
Then Grandfather and Grandmother built a big two-storey house with a sloping roof and lots of rooms and steps and terraces and a huge veranda and placed plain wooden furniture everywhere inside and outside the house and when it was ready Grandfather began to plant things until the field became a Garden of Eden where he walked around in his big black beard. All he had to do was to point at a plant and it was blessed and grew until it groaned under its own weight.
- Sculptor's Daughter by Tove Jansson
#dailydrawing #tovejansson
From the chaotic artist mind pours the energy needed to grow your future. A little seed takes growth in your life and stretches across everything manifesting ideas into tangible results.
