The Huntsman and Granny...

...The freshly falling snow blew in eddies about the kitchen garden and the young man stepped delicately up the snowy path to the door...

....A boy came out from the village to build up her hearth for the night an hour ago and the kitchen crackles with busy firelight. She has her Bible for company, she is a pious old woman. She is propped up on several pillows in the bed set into the wall peasant -fashion, wrapped up in the patchwork quilt she made before she was married, more years than she cares to remember. Two china spaniels with liver-coloured blotches on their coats and black noses sit on either side of the fireplace. There is a bright rug of woven rags on the pantiles. The grandfather clock ticks away her eroding time.

We keep the wolves outside by living well.

He rapped upon the panels with his hairy knuckles.
It is your granddaughter, he mimicked in a high soprano.
Lift up the latch and walk in, my darling.

~ Angela Carter, The Company of Wolves.

...Since I so enjoyed working on my first Red Riding Hood and the Wolf illustration, I thought I'd have a bash at another- this time using Angela Carter's interpretation of the story – so here we have the Huntsman arriving at the door, his compass in hand, about to call on Granny...

In the original story, the Wolf is a wolf. Simple.
In Carter's version, he's a man – or so it appears. But then it gets a bit more complicated...

'Are you our kind - or their kind?'
'Not one, or the other - both.'
'Then where do you live? In our world? or theirs?'
'I come and go between them. My home is nowhere.'

This can happen in stories. As Neil Gaiman writes of Anansi, the Caribbean god:

You want to know if Anansi looked like a spider? Sure he did, except when he looked like a man.
No, he never changed his shape. It's just a matter of how you tell the story. That's all.

Umm...
The Huntsman / Wolf doesn't actually have wings in either the story or the film version.
They just appeared in my picture of their own accord. I'm not quite sure why. But I thought I'd leave em in.

................

Drawn while listening to the sublime Nick Cave – who I had the enormous pleasure of seeing at the Palace Theatre in London last weekend ~ along with the ever-brilliant Warren Ellis and Martyn Casey.
We were treated to readings from his new novel, fantastic Q+A sessions with the audience ~ and a 16-song set list.
From the extraordinary tenderness of Into My Arms (where Warren's violin solo had me in tears) and (Are You) The One That I've Been Waiting For? - to the thundering raw energy of Tupelo and Red Right Hand, they just blew me away...
I still feel electrically charged and buzzing from the experience. Live performances are always wonderful, but this really was unlike anything I'd seen before...(and it was my first time seeing Nick and co. live).

The marvellous blogger, writer and artist Melissa Johnson put it much better than I could, after seeing Cave and the Seeds perform last year:

'He is not human. He is half electric eel, half vampire, and wholly, unbelievably alive. He took hold of the microphone as if it were a viper and proceeded to blast us out of our socks...

...Now, I have no idea how to top this musical experience. I'll have to travel to darkest Appalachia and seek out some tent revival somewhere where they're handling live rattlesnakes and drinking venom, which is about the only thing--in my mind--that could possibly compete.'

Messrs Cave, Ellis and Casey – not to mention Wydler, Sclavunos, Savage, Kuepper – and certainly not forgetting Bargeld and Harvey – I salute you! :-)