Faces and Reflection

I have been drifting around the house doing nothing particularly productive for the past week. The same cycle goes on. I'd sit at the drawing table, pick up a pencil and pause. Draw a face and stop. Get up to the kitchen, make coffee and read a book. A pile of laundry to wash, kids to feed and TV programs that steal none of my interests. Then I'd come back to the drawing table, take a longer pause, draw another face and stop. Strangely enough, I haven't been able to go anywhere beyond faces, faces, and more faces. So after kicking and forcing myself to paint my last pieces, which as you already know were yet again faces, I decided to call it quits for a while. That is until a fellow artist asked me a question that really stopped my drifting completely. He wanted to know if those faces were me.

Good question, I thought to myself. I never have models posed for my work, and I always start a drawing anywhere I please on a paper without thinking or imagining. From one single line and finish with another. So why do these faces seem familiar? Maybe they are me, just tiny fractions of myself that accidentally slipped through. Or maybe inspirations that have sneaked into my mind while I read the abundant copies of books that have now taken up as much space as the growing spread of toys in my kids' room. Well, call me a bookworm, but they are my ultimate source of inspiration. With characters alive in my mind...imperfect, not without flaws. Enchanting, yet human to the core.


So here goes another face, and her name is Meghann.The beautiful "ashes of roses".
 

"...There is a legend, about a bird that sings just once in its life. From the moment it leaves its nest, it searches for a thorn tree and does not rest until it's found one. And then it sings more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. And singing, it impales itself on the longest, sharpest thorn. But, as it dies, it rises above its own agony, to out-sing the lark and the nightingale. The thorn bird pays its life for just one song, but the whole world stills to listen, and God in his heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain..."

Maybe you could guess which book she lingers in?