A Muse Continues to Sing.

I was in the studio the other day involved in an end of the year clean up when I came across one of my early paintings from the eighties called, You Pagan (right).  As an aside you might notice that this model, one of my few male models, has been in two other paintings (Red and Black Amphorae, Cartoon for the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, click titles for links) and I am currently working on a third using him.

Anyway, in this painting, which seems to be somewhat off my usual subject, the background motif being Egyptian rather than Greek reminded me of one of my favorite authors who passed away a couple of years ago, Elizabeth Peters (though I must note here that I have at least a hundred favorite authors). She also wrote under the name of Barbara Michaels and Barbara Mertz, and was an Egyptologist with a long running and very humorous series about a family of archaeologists working in Egypt from the Victorian period through the First World War.

I think of her now not only because of my painting but also because of The New Yorker article, “What’s in a Muse?,” which I recently discussed on this site in one my Artist’s Notes. In it, Anna Heyward reflects on the status of Isabelle Mége as an artist vs muse. Elizabeth Peters was a literary artist but, upon reflection, also a muse. She inspired other literary artists and after her death her characters took life in other’s novels. I ran across characters from her Egyptian series on the pages of novels from two other of my favorite authors, Mercedes Lackey and Tasha Alexander. It is a delight for me to know that despite the fact that Elizabeth Peters can no longer set down new stories she continues on as a muse and her characters continue to live and evolve in the art of others.