Tea at Trianon: Artist Justin Gerard on Tolkien

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, June 23, 2019

Artist Justin Gerard on Tolkien

Beren and Lúthien by Justin Gerard

From TOR:

There is so much wonderful detail here. Beren’s ghostly hand (since his real one is gone) and the representation of the Silmaril that he’d held there—which I see you rendered here in the same visible symbolic fashion of your “Hunting of Carcharoth” painting. I love the saintly nimbus behind Lúthien’s head and the winglike sweep of her robes (a nod to her erstwhile Thuringwethil bat-costume). And the fact that Beren still looks like he carries the griefs and wisdom of his experiences. He’s being restored but he’s not forgetting everything nor is he given a fresh new or younger body. This just feels…right.

What can you tell me about this piece? Are those swirls on Beren’s arm a tattoo? The embodiment of the wolf’s poison? Tell me more!
Justin: The swirls were definitely meant to be the wolf’s poison. Working on the images from Beren and Lúthien, I was not trying to show specific moments exactly, but instead trying to collapse a series of events and moments into one scene that could kind of make sense of them all and convey the ideas, more than a literal event per se. This image does have a lot of those small symbols in it. I wanted to treat this one a bit more like iconography than photography if that makes sense. It is meant to be after Beren and Lúthien’s escape, after Beren has had his hand bitten off by Carcharoth and his life still hangs in the balance, but it is also meant to foreshadow Lúthien later singing to bring Beren back from death as well.