Dawn Wind, by Rosemary Sutcliff, was first published in 1961 when I was 11 years old. The Redwood City Public Library had a copy which I read during the summer of 1961. The black and white drawings of the two main characters, a 14-year-old boy and a girl of about the same age, made a deep impression on me. I wished that I could draw like the illustrator, Charles Keeping. In the following years, the memory of those drawings stayed with me. When I was a volunteer shelf-reader in the children's section of our local public library, I found the book and looked at the drawings again. They were just as I remembered them, just as stirring to my imagination. The drawings brought the story to life for me. I remembered how it felt to identify closely with the lives of the boy and the girl who lived long ago where my ancestors on my mother's side had lived.
Here's what the book jacket says about the story which takes place in Sixth Century Southern Britain:
The boy lay in the silence of the great battlefield, gazing at his own hand spread on the ground beside him. The hand moved and he realized, with something like surprise , that he was not dead ...
.... It seemed to Owain that nobody but himself had been left alive, until the lean shape of Dog slid towards him from the shadows and licked his hand ....
... The story covers the twelve years that followed Aquae Sulis; for Owain they were hard and difficult years, many of them spent in thrall to a Saxon farmer. Yet he found kindness and happiness where he least expected it; he found Regina, hidden and half-starved among the ruins of Viroconium ...
A few weeks ago, I went online looking for a used copy and was able to buy one that had been in one of the Croydon Public Libraries in South London. My desire was to see what would happen if I tried to copy the drawings into the form of a mandala with my non-dominant left hand.
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Early this morning, way before dawn, I sat down at my drawing table for the first time since June and picked up my 6B pencil with my non-dominant left hand and began to copy the first illustration (besides the cover), which appeared on the title page. Five illustrations later, I had finished the mandala, all the while listening to Bob Dylan's "Rough and Rowdy Ways" CD.
Once again, I am astounded at my ability to draw with my non-dominant left hand. The drawing comes easily, much more easily than drawing with my right hand.
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Early morning crow
