David was away at a friend’s bachelor party last weekend so I did what I always do when he’s out of town: went to visit my sister in New York. Here she is with Sam and Frederico, a.k.a, the Baron von Chomperstein, who was good enough to curl up and sleep on my feet, with only a wee bit of gnawing on the ankles in the morning.
To help pass the bus ride I brought along the book Monkey, which I picked up solely for the title at a used bookstore on Beacon Street. Its a translation (and abridgment) of a 16th Century chinese novel, detailing the exploits of the Monkey King and his voyage to India with the pilgrim Tripitaka. I’m only about half way through but am totally enamored of the book, from the foreword describing how the author loved “tales of monsters” as a child, was schooled to imitate classical (Tang dynasty) poetry as an adult, and only late in life got up the courage to publish his famous adventure tale anonymously, to the description of a Heaven where dragons go to the Jade Emperor for restraining orders, you can build a good credit rating in the Underworld, and Judges of Dead can be bribed with melons. But the best part is Monkey, rascal supreme, who is born from a stone egg, learns immortality from a sage, then proceeds to make such a tremendous nuisance of himself that the Jade Emperor’s nephew, Lao Tzu, and Buddha have to be called in to deal with him.
As when I read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities a few years ago, I was seized with an urge to illustrate some of the scenes from the book. (That was also, come to think of it, on a visit to my sister. Seems that these visits are good for creative inspiration.) The first question I had was what the Monkey King should look like. I looked through images of the Monkey King on Google, from traditional illustrations to Jet Li, but ended up mostly using some of my sketches of the snow monkeys in Nagano, Japan. Here are a few preliminary sketches:
Finally, here’s a more recent picture of one of the “adoptee” Canadian geese. There’s only a little bit of down left on his nose to show that he’s a youngster. (That and the fact that he says “peep” instead of “honk” when crowding around my bicycle hoping for a handout of lettuce.) They grow up so fast!
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