Color in the Snow

         Snow naturally lends itself to black and white (or possibly grey and white), and yet here are three artists who have used full color to depict their snowy scenes.

        First, last night’s snowstorm as illustrated in 1946 by Kawase Hasui (Japan, 1883-1957).  I’ve featured block prints by Hasui before, including an island (my favorite), some fruit, and another snow scene.  In this one I particularly love the lighted windows in the dusk, something I absolutely never tire of seeing in either real life or art.  As for the snow, one thing that’s interesting is that it’s not just white but a range of greys and blues, some really quite dark.  Even though we tend to think of snow and snowflakes as being white, it’s much more realistic for them to look grey under some circumstances, such as when they’re blocking the light from a lighter area.

        Next I have an urban scene by George G. Adomeit (Lithuania/USA, 1879-1967).  I love that the car places us in 1933, and Adomeit has used browns and warm greys which reinforces that sepia-toned sense of a vintage scene, even though I assume he had no such perspective at the time.  One of the most interesting things about this print is the use of textured paper.  In general textured paper is considered a problem because it prevents the block from printing cleanly, but in this case it works really well with the picture.  I also really like the way the broken fence in the foreground frames the scene both visually and from a storytelling perspective.

        And for a final piece I’ve got the majestic vista of a snowy landscape that dwarfs the human buildings, by Nina Sage (UK).  The buildings are warm browns against the huge cool grey and blue expanse of snow and ice.  I particularly like the way the lake (or fjord?) is depicted.  I previously shared a nuthatch by Sage.

        All three of these look to be multi-block prints with at least four colors, and certainly more for some.  Now, sometimes I feel like extra layers in block prints are unnecessary and gratuitous, complicating something that is remarkable precisely because of its simplicity - but in the case of these three pieces I do really like the subtle layers of detail that the extra colors add.

        And now I’ll soon have to stop admiring snow in art and go out to shovel snow in real life!

[Pictures: Snowstorm at Shiobara, color woodcut by Kawase Hasui, 1946 (Image from The Cleveland Museum of Art);

Back of Houses in Snow, color woodcut by George G. Adomeit, 1933 (Image from The Cleveland Museum of Art);

The Boathouse, linocut by Nina Sage (Image from VK Gallery).]

News Round-Up

         It’s time for updates on a whole slew of recent projects…

        1. Back in December I participated in “Speed-Date a Book” with Strong Women-Strange Worlds, in which I made a fun two-minute pitch for Bittersweetness & Light in the form of a fantastical weather report.  Alas, the recording isn’t perfect: at the end it doesn’t show the whole panel of “contestants,” and even worse, during my pitch it shows only my slides and not me, which is in keeping with technology’s increasingly emphatic attempts to gaslight me.  I assure you I was there in front of the screen during the live event!  (Have I somehow become a ghost or a vampire?)  But at any rate, you can still enjoy my pitch, which you can watch here.

        2. Also back in December I had several art shows and was working on several blocks.  Here’s the progress I’ve reached: one had a test print and is ready for final tweaking and proper printing, one is probably about two thirds of the way finished, and the third is just barely begun.  I’ll need to start two more to use as sample blocks at upcoming workshops in the next month, but I’m certainly hoping to get back to more of my own sweet carving, as well.

        3. More recently I just spent the weekend at the Arisia sci fi/fantasy convention in Cambridge, MA and it was fantastic!  I was on the half-dozen panels listed in my last post,

plus two group readings.  I sold lots of books and a ton of art, and my piece “Symbiote City (Venusian Medusae)” won the Con Chair’s Choice Award!  You can read more about the piece at this prior post (which is also relevant for the panel I was on, about “Designing Things that Don’t Exist”).  And on top of all that, I had a lot of really nice conversations with people about art and writing and sharing the things that give us hope.  Really Good Stuff!

        4. Looking somewhat ahead, I am plunging into work on my next book, Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns, because it’s high time to get cracking on decisions about what to include, what order to put things in, what additional pieces of artwork I need to fill in gaps, and so on.  I just received marketing postcards in time to give them out at the conventions; I just received the enamel pins that are one of the Kickstarter backer rewards; and I just got a bunch of beta reader feedback that I need to digest and process and use for decision-making.  It’s all very daunting and very exciting!

        5. Meanwhile, there will need to be lots of matting and framing for Boskone in three weeks… not to mention all the other stuff I was complaining about in my Jan. 5 post!  (Also meanwhile, I’ve had to migrate to a new newsletter program and at the moment I cannot even express how intensely I’m hating it.  Ugh!  But there are plenty of other things to worry about, both more positive and more negative, so that’s a problem for another day.)

        6. Another fun tidbit is that I currently have artwork on display in public outdoor art galleries in two towns.  I absolutely love this format, in which the artwork of multiple artists beautifies otherwise boring or ugly fences around town, and the selection rotates to new locations at intervals so that it stays fresh and interesting to everyone going about their daily rounds.  It’s an honor to have my work accepted in these two projects, and between this and my successes at Arisia I’ve been feeling very affirmed in my art recently.

        All of which means that, as always, I do hope you know that if you’ve bought my work, read my books, left reviews, told your friends, or supported me in any one of  many ways either tangible or intangible, it really does make a difference to me and I do appreciate it very much.

[Pictures: Screen shots from my Speed-Date pitch for Bittersweetness & Light, all graphics by AEGNydam, 2025;

Rubber blocks plus test print of Needham cupolas by AEGNydam, 2026;

Photos from Arisia, (photo of me at Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading by Randee Dawn), 2026;

Photos of assorted other projects and art by AEGNydam, 2026.]

Abstracts for the New Year

         Here are a couple of abstract woodcuts that somehow seem suitable for the vibe of a new year stretching ahead.  The artist is Yukio Hasumi (Japan, b. 1927), about whom I can find no information beyond the birth date - not even a death date, which means they’re 99 this year!  Hasumi did a number of pieces with similar marks and color gradations, and I find it interesting that they used variations of the same branching, seaweedy patterns over and over.  I’d be curious to learn whether there was a significance behind the forms, or did the artist just feel like it.  Many of Hasumi’s woodcuts include “Saku” as the title, which may mean “to bloom.”

        In the absence of any further information to give you, I simply share these pieces and invite you to sink in and see whether they speak to you.  Given their dates (1970-71), they probably aim to expand your mind!

        Meanwhile, I’ve been very busy preparing for the Arisia con this weekend, in which I’ll have a very full schedule of art show, readings, panels, and shifts at the Broad Universe book table in the Dealers Room.  My panels include:

    The Moral of the Story Is…  (You all know from the April A to Z Challenge how much I love a moral!)

    Writing Hope (You know from Bittersweetness & Light, not to mention… well, everything, how much I love hopeful stories!)

    Cartography in Sci Fi/Fantasy (You know from the “maps” link over in the sidebar how much I love fantasy cartography!)

    Designing Things that Don’t Exist (You know from the number of times I’ve been on similar panels how much I enjoy this topic!  You can find some related posts here.)

    Songs, Poems, and Stories in Modern Sci Fi/Fantasy (You know from the “poetry” link in the sidebar how much I love fantasy poetry!  You can find a few specific posts to explore here.)

    Faiths of Fantasy and the Future (You know from the fact that I was on this panel last year how interested I am in the topic!  Here’s what I said about the panel then.)

        You can see my whole schedule and full panel descriptions here.  If you’ll be at Arisia don’t hesitate to say hello!

[Pictures: Saku Q-11, color woodcut by Hasumi, 1970;

Saku SZ-6, color woodcut by Hasumi, 1971 (Images from The Cleveland Museum of Art).]

The Sky is Falling!

         In my last post I mentioned the story of Chicken Little - as we call it in the USA.  In England the tale often begins with Henny Penny, who’s the second character in most American versions.  In fact, the names of all the characters involved are highly variable, although they’re usually rhyming or alliterative, such as Chicken Licken, Hen Pen, Cocky Locky, Goosey Loosey, Ducky Lucky, or Ducky Daddles.  But the basic outline of the story is relatively constant: a bird gets hit by some little falling thing (acorn or leaf) and concludes that the sky is falling.  As they run along in a panic, they tell all the other birds they meet, who join the mass hysteria until they all meet a fox.  The wily fox sees that he can manipulate the panicking crowd, and tricks them all into entering his den to be eaten.  The moral of the story is: don’t panic over stupid little things.  The name “Chicken Little” and the cry “The sky is falling” have both become idiomatic in English, signifying people who leap to catastrophic pessimism over nothing and their hysterical, fear-mongering cries.

        Versions of the fable appear in European literature by the early nineteenth century, but were presumably circulating orally long before being seen in print.  Stories with similar patterns and morals also appear many centuries earlier in Buddhist texts.  These fables involve a hare convinced by the sound of a falling fruit that the earth is breaking up.  These versions generally have a happier ending, in which some more benevolent animal (who may even be the Bodhisattva in another form, in some versions) stops the stampede of hysterical animals, finds out the truth about the source of the panic, calms everyone down, and sends them safely home.  Aesop has a fable which doesn’t include the threatened end of the world, but does feature mass hysteria.  In his version panicking hares cause a panic among frogs, which leads another animal to remind the hares that everyone’s life is full of fear and trouble, so you may as well just chill out and bear it.

        The one thing all these stories have in common is that the sky is not, in fact, falling and the world is not breaking up.  The morals point out how foolish it is to leap to overly pessimistic conclusions, how irresponsible it is to incite panic, and how doubly foolish it is to believe the fear-mongering of others without evidence.  The Chicken Little stories also raise the moral of how easily bad actors can manipulate fearful people, so that such foxes can more easily prey on such foolish, helpless fowl.  That’s the moral I think we’re seeing lived out in this time: bad-faith foxes doing their best to keep foolish fowl whipped up into hysterical fear over irrelevances and scapegoats, the better to distract them from real issues, and thus devour them.

        There is another twist to the story that I want to raise up now, though: what about fears that really are justified?  What if the sky really is in danger of falling?  In that case it’s surely reasonable to be afraid, but Chicken Little still gives us a moral about how not to behave.  Even when fear is justified, dashing around in a panic is still not going to help anyone.  Rather than playing right into the greedy hands of the foxes who would manipulate us, instead, how about gathering all the other fowl (and hares, and frogs) and trying to figure out how we can all actually help solve the problem.

        My musings on this traditional story highlight one more point I want to make.  The reason these tales stick around for centuries is that they continue to have relevance to the work of being human.  The reason they have so many variants is that they continue to be adapted to the particular situations in which we find ourselves.  These stories carry universal threads while simultaneously allowing constant tweaking and changing.  That’s their magic and their power, and that’s why storytellers, authors, and artists have continued to revisit them generation after generation.  And that’s why I, too, have been exploring them through art, poetry, and stories for my upcoming book Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns!

[Pictures: first and third, anonymous illustrations from Chicken Little by Mara L. Pratt-Chadwick, ca. 1905 (Images from University of California Libraries Internet Archive);

second, wood engraving by William Roberts from The Wonderful History of Henny-Penny, ca. 1855 (Images from University of California Libraries Internet Archive).]

Letting Down the Blog, Holding Up the Sky

         So here we are, just 5 days into the new year and I’m already exhausted and overwhelmed by all the stupid little jobs I have to do to keep my proverbial sky from falling for all my worthy and important jobs that I really do want to support, but…  But not by having to spend all my time constantly dealing with a thousand stupid little jobs for each of them.  And that’s not to mention the sky falling on the larger world stage.  Sigh.  It doesn’t help that I’m struggling with a very unpleasant cold right now, so I’m not exactly at my most energetic and resilient.  Unfortunately, I’m not able to wiggle out of most of these jobs because I’ve made commitments, but something’s got to give, and right now it’s the blog.  I’d already been scaling back my posts a fair bit, and now I’m going to do so even further.

        No, I’m not quitting.  I do plan to continue posting with some frequency, albeit less regularly.  I do intend to do the April A to Z Challenge.  But on the days when posting just feels like one more oppressive chore, I’m simply going to skip it.

        To illustrate my general malaise, here’s a wood block illustration of Chicken Little starting the panic, “The sky is falling!  The sky is falling!”  I wouldn’t call this a particularly noteworthy or artistically pleasing block print, but the illustrator of this little pamphlet did a workmanlike-enough job with it.  The illustrator is not named in the version of the booklet I've posted here, but this may be a reprint or copy (pirated or otherwise) of an 1840 version by John Greene Chandler.  In any case, I must say that Henny Penny (or Hen Pen, as this version calls her) looks quite fearsome, though!

        You probably remember the moral of the story, which is that it’s all much ado about nothing, and the senseless panic leads to the manipulation and ultimate demise of the foolish fowl.  In this current time I think a certain amount of alarm is well-justified, although my own troubles are very minor indeed.  How about if I keep the lights on here at “Black and White: Words and Pictures” by promising to come back next post with more about the folklore of “the sky is falling” stories around the world?  I’m just not going to make any promises about how soon that “next time” might be.  And in the meantime, I’ll keep trying to hold up my corner of the sky.  If you hold up yours, maybe we’ll all be able to keep the whole thing from falling.

[Picture: Chicken Little and Hen Pen, wood engraving (by John Greene Chandler?) from Remarkable Story of Chicken Little by Degen, Estes & Co., between 1865-71 (Image from University of California Libraries).]