Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Sacred Falcon


The stylized bird depicted here is a Peregrine Falcon, which I used as a sacred symbol back in those wonderful spiritual years of the 1980s. (No, really.1980s for me.) I've been a birdwatcher for almost my entire life and I've only seen a real Peregrine once or twice. But I incorporated it into my DAW Books Darkover cover for "Hawkmistress" by Marion Zimmer Bradley. The hawk in the Bradley book was named "Preciosa" but I was trying to refer back to the Ancient Egyptian hawk god, Horus. In my childhood I had a devotion to Horus the hawk, I was a good little Pagan. There is a black stone statue of the Hawk God in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts which was an inspiration to my spiritual youth. 

The halo of this Spirit Hawk is dark silver metallic paint. The bright star in the distance was a motif I used in a lot of the spiritual or New Age paintings I did in that era. The star was either the Star of Bethlehem, or more likely a symbol of the distant but beckoning Light of God.

"Spirit Hawk" is acrylic on illustration board, 8" x 10", December 1984.

1 comment:

Tristan Alexander said...

Very Nice, I still think you should do a Tarot deck!