Finally. I finished drawing number eighty of the eighty that I set out to do to illustrate my last book of poetry. This one is for the poem, "The Salt Eaters: A Song for the Americas." For the background I once again consulted my father’s World War Two photograph album and selected one of his landscapes. I selected this one because the sinuous road winding its way up the mountainside echoed the shapes a dancer’s cape made. The poem is about human flight the way it is sometimes experienced in dreams. I used this as an analogy for the strange but exciting rootlessness that children of immigrants might feel as ties with a homeland loosen. In the poem, the unbound start to float then swim through space as if the air is water. My original poem was written so long ago I can no longer recall the source for the story of a mythological salt that enables one to fly.
It seemed to me that the best model for a flying figure would be a dancer. So I used a picture I had taken of a dancer from the Beijing Dance Academy as he spun around with a cape. He truly appeared to be airborne. I was lucky enough to have been invited by the Confucius Institute, along with my husband, to the Chinese New Year celebration at the University of South Carolina where we were treated to an outstanding dance performance. I superimposed the dance figure over my father’s landscape to create the effect of someone flying through space to an uncertain horizon. I did change the head position so his face is turned towards the horizon, as this seemed to better suit the theme of the poem.
The completed charcoal drawing is below:
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