Easter sunshine and cold winds

More time off skyping with family;
 but over Easter I have also spent a lot of time reading - including singer Ian Bostridge's chunky little volume on Schubert's Winterreise......Covid time is time for all those heavy hardbacks, now there's no need to have something light and pocketable for bus and train journeys....

Winterreise is of course the existential journey of isolation so to speak -
beginning... I came a stranger I depart a stranger ( in Bostridge's translation)...
you can see the book I made some years ago (2005) on my archive at www.carolyntrant.co.uk.
It is also up on the musicologist Dr Iain Phillips Winterreise website on https://winterreise.online

- click on art and then on my name among other artists...an interesting collection of interpretations....
here are just a few of my images...

I suppose my Fool is embarked similarly on a journey - again the reasons for his expulsion from society ambiguous - is he the last from the ship? self isolating? taking on the scapegoat role? The Fool is traditionally part of the court, of society, the fall-guy, but used to showing society its faults and failings - an outsider but also an essential part of the gang...
how does he operate on his own???
I have spent time over Easter trying to make the set of images I am forming coherent, if not a narrative; including the city scenes was difficult, both stylistically visually and as concepts;

I spent ages with an image of Fool turning the corner past an empty cafe - ages with perspective studies and drawing a cafe interior - and then junked them all suddenly to include instead another image I had done as a peeling poster on a city wall....immediately I felt that 'ping', like when you use binoculars and things suddenly come into focus.....

it led to town coming into country more easily... and used another tricky image that needed a scenario...
maybe it will be the key to integrating the rest...
I will put up images of the new set tomorrow...





Midway in Winterreise Schubert includes a poem called Loneliness/Einsamkeit

Oh, that the air is so still!
Oh, that the world is so full of light!
When the storms were still raging
I wasn't half so wretched. 

Over this Covid Easter that translates as - "and now that on Easter Monday that really cold wind has come back and there is more cloud it doesn't feel half so upsetting not being able to go for a long walk...."