In Damascus, Virginia, near access to the Virginia Creeper trail, is a bed and breakfast known as the Millsap-Baker Estate. The house is more of a museum than a place of lodging. Each room brims with old pipes and depression glass. The breakfast area resembles something from Harry Potter, and the host and hostess tell stories every morning over home-cooked breakfast with 4 kinds of jam.
Outside of the Victorian ediface of the Millsap-Baker Estate is a large Ginko tree surrounded in a halo of yellow confetti leaves, perfectly shaped like wings. I printed my Ginko leaf in red because yellow does not contrast enough with paper, though it is a mixed red. In this color, it more resembles a Japanese fan of some kind.
The shape took me so thoroughly that I carved it into a woodblock and attempted to make cards from it. I'm still learning to manage this level of detail.
My third illustration for Lucy's Dance treats the delicate topic of the missionaries who visited Stebbins in the late 1920's and stopped the Curukaq festival . . . or rather, tamed it into hiatus. A Jesuit missionary, Fr. Martin Lonneaux, overlooking the support-system of the Yup'ik community, perceived that the gift-giving portion of the festival was costly enough that it left several Yup'ik families destitute. Lonneaux concocted a watered-down version of the potlatch that would involve smaller, church-supplied gifts, but in the process amputated the festive spirit of the festival such that his "pretend kassiyuq " never caught on. For further details, see Stebbins Dance Festival (xxiv). The wording in Lucy's Dance focuses neutrally on the cultural misunderstanding. It would have been easy to use powerfully-charged language when summarizing this cultural loss. From what little I can find about him, Fr. Lonneaux, SJ seems to have been a relatively toler...
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