There's a whole genre of paintings, spanning the ages, depicting idealized rural and farm scenes where happy peasants toil in clean, productive fields. They were especially popular in 19th century Europe where the Industrial Revolution's smoky furnaces and grinding mills made people long for the imaginary way it was before the smokestacks took over. I borrowed this Darkover scene from one of those paintings. A male and female peasant harvest native wheat grass, while in the background a cralmac, or perhaps a catman, one of the indigenous sentient species of the planet, helps the humans. The scene is tinted with the rays of the great Red Sun. Marion Zimmer Bradley didn't write a lot about peasants. She preferred to write about magic users, aristocrats, and fighters. You don't get as much audience writing about fieldworkers, unless they revolt.
Acrylic on heavy illustration board, 10" x 8", September 1989.
2 comments:
I like that a lot! Only I think more sweat would show on his white shirt ... and it would be homespun, maybe unbleached linen. But not to be picky. This is excellent.
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