I am happier with this painting now. In it I see elements from different fairy and mythic tales, but she is Daphne. She is composed from my imagination.

Steven said, 'I have only been able to give the picture a quick look.  But I enjoyed a strange chilliness – not in a sense of anything emotionally frigid, but something wintery, something gelid, something in the tree branches that suggested icicles.  And I loved the eyes.  Two such different eyes to have on one face, and both so full of personality.  And the way the tilt of the eyes was taken up by the mouth.'

Yes, I felt Persephone, the onset of Winter, as I was drawing her!
_

Here is a little slideshow of the stages of the poem painting (click to go to Picasa for a larger viewing):

(I think this poem goes with what may be a "Vishnu" series, the first of which is Vishnu on Chinese New Year.)


The red flower spirals
or it's a fractal
folding.

His heart is a window
box with a red flower

Beating. Petals spiral in, or out,
Magritte-like.

A map in water, a warehouse, snowblue.
Lost pink dancing slippers,
a church in black and white,
a chorus singing carols.

Quarantine. Insolence. Defiance.
Burlap and cold steel.
Madness in prison.

I heard the message,
its jumbled sanity.

Fragments of patterns,
like this poem,
torn from the epic.

Worlds within worlds.

Bullets and blood, the heart floods.
Five billion dying in biological warfare.
What was that movie where he dreamed his death,
unable to save the world.

Saviour, the preserver.

We'll all be saved on a microchip,
says the prophetess.