The World Above the Fog

From the "Art of C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy" collection: a scene from book III, That Hideous Strength, as Jane Studdock arrives at the village of St. Anne's on the Hill at the end of chapter 6:

"The slow journey through the fog almost sent her to sleep. She hardly thought about St. Anne's until she found herself there.... She was roused from this state by noticing that it was lighter. She looked ahead: surely that bend in the road was more visible than it ought to be in such a fog? Or was it only that a country fog was different from a town one? Certainly what had been gray was becoming white, almost dazzlingly white. A few yards further and luminous blue was showing overheard and trees cast shadows (she had not seen a shadow for days), and then all of a sudden the enormous spaces of the sky had become visible and the pale golden sun, and looking back, as she took the turn to the Manor, Jane saw that she was standing on the shore of a little green sun-lit island looking down on a sea of white fog, furrowed and ridged yet level on the whole, which spread as far as she could see. There were other islands too. That dark one on the west was the wooded hills above Sandown where she had picnicked with the Dennistons; and the far bigger and brighter one to the north was the many caverned hills - mountains one could nearly call them - in which the Wynd had its source. She took a deep breath. It was the size of this world above the fog which impressed her. Down in Edgestow all these days one had lived, even when out-of-doors, as if in a room, for only objects close at hand were visible. She felt she had come near to forgetting how big the sky is, how remote the horizon."

As soon as I read that I decided that I had to do this before reading any further, not knowing that it would occupy me for ten days (and the book is due back today and cannot be renewed, because someone has put a hold on it). This is the first digital painting I've finished on which I "really tried" since I did this in 2005, and I STILL don't really know what I'm doing. :-P I integrated photographs directly into it, mostly taken this summer in England:

• All of the bricks are from The Kilns, C.S. Lewis' home in Oxford (pictures here).
• On the house in the background, the chimney, windows, roof, front door, doorstep, and garden path texture are directly from The Kilns.
• The roof of the foreground house is taken from the protective structure built over the Roman Town House in Dorchester (photos here).
• The windows of the foreground house are from the Aylesbury train station. :-P
• The texture of the trees on the distant hills is from a photo of me in Upstate New York taken in 1996.
• The texture of the road (not the tiles themselves, those are just the Photoshop tile effect) is from "The Cobb" in Lyme Regis (photos here).
• The grass in front of the road is from Maiden Castle, and the texture of the grass behind the road is from the center of the "Maumbury Rings" Roman amphitheatre in Dorchester (pictures of both here).
• The huge door in the wall (which is probably far larger than it should be, but I like it that way) is loosely based on this door in Cambridge.
• The sky is from a photo I took out an aeroplane window, and the fog is a heavily smoothed-out and brightened photo of clouds taken on a different flight.

Yes, the wall looks like a prison. I thought it would be best to make it look very uninviting to Jane, with an inexplicable ornament on the corner just for fun. :-P We had a sort of cup-like shape everywhere on the campus of the university I went to, and no one knew what it was or where it came from. The wall ought to be at least 10 times farther away from Saxon Cross than it is here, but I figured I'd never draw it unless I put it in this picture, so there it is.

I thought in retrospect that maybe I should have put in thatch-roofed cottages instead of more modern houses, but I didn't live around thatch when I was in England so I don't think of it as normal. :-P Also I'm pretty certain that it's dead wrong for houses not to be surrounded with a fence and a garden, but I didn't want to spend another entire day putting that in.... XD Oh, and I never did get around to putting in a sign at the crossing. And maybe some birds. Well, I can always add stuff later. :-D

Dedicated to my mother.

Original sketch

Artists I listened to a lot while working on this: Nightwish, Michael Jackson, The Birthday Massacre, Kamelot, Leaves' Eyes, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, P.O.D., Hopes Were High, Caspian, Ayumi Hamasaki, Epica, The Last Shadow Puppets, The Gathering, Elis, Trail of Tears, Sonata Arctica. :-P