Poem/illustration project

Phew! Can't believe it's been over a month since my last update! No time for beating myself up about it, though. I've have a lot to get through!

One of the most important projects of late is the poem/illustration project. Each of us were given a poem from a student in one of the English classes and our job was to create a piece of art for that poem. The poem I received is called ''Missing'' by Kayla Koury. It goes like this:

I went to a land of dreaming spires,
But I didn't want to leave.
To think I would not love being there,
I suppose it was naive.
My heart aches to be away,
like a long arm in a very short sleeve.

For at the time,
I did not understand
that the land of brats and cheese
was not my true homeland.
For in this place I felt a peace
as if my right was holding my left hand.

I would have loved to linger and dream,
I wanted to stay there forever.
I'm not crossing my fingers behind my back,
I'm not playing tricks or being clever.
Somehow it just felt right.
To come back home, I was okay with never.

After meeting with Kayla, I discovered that the Land of Dreaming Spires is another name for Oxford in England, where she studied abroad last semester. Then it became my task to create a piece of art that I felt expressed the essence of her poem in the best way. I decided the feeling of the artwork should be dreamlike - playing off the ''dreaming'' spires idea and the line ''I would have loved to linger and dream''. And of course, the person dreaming had to be Kayla. After a few sketches of ideas, this is basically the composition I came up with:

I got a chance to ask her what her favorite landmarks were that she visited during her trip, and she mentioned the Radcliffe Camera Library at Oxford, the Bodelian Library, the Roman aqueducts at Segovia, Stonehenge, and she also mentioned that she loved the green countryside of England, so I tried to incorporate each landmark in some way. Anyway, I am more or less finished with the project as of today, and this is what it came out to be. It's done mostly in oil pastel with some colored pencil and acrylic paint.

I'm getting it matted tomorrow and will hopefully also get a frame soon. We're having a showing of the art and reading of the poems at the Higher Grounds cafe on Tuesday, April 13... can't wait! (I hope Kayla likes it.)