I drew this illustration as a contribution to the communal blog continuum-art. At this blog, one person's post is added to and continued by others, using a variety of mediums.
The illustration was inspired by Vesna's creation of the title phrase (I look at you and my mind opens) and the shell photo she added, and also by the poem Migue added. Then Vesna came back and added her own poem.
I tried to incorporate the spiral connectedness of the shell, linking the various threads around the drawing. The image also fits with the first line of Migue's poem "Ni siquiera una mirada, para verte," as the central character--the clown gazing upon the simple string carried by the bird which inspires the opening of the possibilities of his world--is aware of the presence of all the other characters somewhere within himself. I was playing with the idea that he creates them with his imagination but also that they are there, unseen until he opens his imagination. And that one's imagination can be opened simply--with nothing more than a glance from another or of another. The bird could be the soul of the girl, here shown at different stages in her life all at once.
The vines draped over each of the young trapeze-artist's arms are loosely (the plant is not actually a vine) based on the drawings of the Adonis flammea in The Book of Botanical Prints by Basilius Besler. According to that Dressendorfer and Littger, who edited the book, "their red flowers recall the legend of how the flowers grew from the blood of the handsome favorite of the gods, which is why the plant has had this name since the 17th century." Adonis was a Greek god, a son of Cyprus, closely linked to the rebirth and vegetation deities of several other cultures. Wikipedia says, "He is an annually-renewed, ever-youthful vegetation god, a life-death-rebirth deity whose nature is tied to the calendar."
One of the reasons he is linked with the cycles of death and birth lies in his beauty. Again, Wikipedia: "As soon as Adonis was born, the baby was so beautiful that Aphrodite placed him in a closed chest, which she delivered for security to Persephone, who was also entranced by his unearthly beauty and refused to give him back. The argument between the goddess of love and the goddess of death was settled by Zeus, with Adonis spending six months with Aphrodite...and six months with Persephone."
