The Enchanter's Theorem

Last Light of Summer by Angela N. Hunt

As most of you have tracked, the Sky Horse series came into being because of a dream I had after my father died. And they keep visiting me. Like this image. It's not that far off from what was in my head.

The original lives with the Amazing A. But you can have a sliver of the last light here over at Imagekind: http://angelanhunt.imagekind.com/store

Seems appropriate for Litha.

So I hung the first of my paintings in the house last night.

It's The Wasteland, the painting that consumed me after my father died, the one that I dreamed and which wouldn't leave me alone till I'd put it to canvas. I still remember the day I stood in Pearl, pulling canvas after canvas out of the racks, going, "Too small, too small, still too small," until the Ant pulled out the big one and I said, "Crap. That one."

It just fit in the hatchback of her car. It's not truly enormous, the way that say, Hazel Dooney's work is. But it's enormous by my standards. 36x48, I believe.

The painting itself flowed out of me in the space of mere days.

It still hits me. Pale blue sky horses racing over a spring time mesa. It could be Utah or the Dakotas. The great copper mesa over it all. And the black pier in the center of it all.

Yes. There's a pier in the desert. Black planks. It was one of the huge features in that long ago dream. In the dream, as dream logic will, the only reason I was able to visit that land was because I didn't touch the ground. I stood on the pier and watched the sky horses run.

They haven't left me, those horses. There's even more paintings of them in me. Occasionally I feel them stir under my breast bone. There's Storm's Rider, which I mean to block in soon. There's Sky Full of Stars, which is insisting on another enormous canvas before it'll allow me to paint it. And then, well, there's another Pegasus Rising that wants to be the size of the side of a house. Don't know if that's going to be canvas or straight up mural. I'd need the house first if it's going to be mural. It wants a 15 foot tall wall at the least.

All, horses made of sky. Morning, noon, dusk, night. Some stormy, others the perfect blue that shows up in LA. Some beclouded.

Dream interpretation and animal speak see the horse as Power. The means of crossing from the land of the living to the land of the dead. The latter has always been very clear to me, though as with Last Light of Summer, I'm beginning to think that my Horse, the ones that follow me in colors of seasonal sky, are more about transition and the ability to travel from one state to another. From the mourning of death back to life. From dream to awake. From the borders of fairyland to the street of the concrete forest I work in every day.

I've begun to have ideas for sky horses running down the pavement canyons, brilliant against the industrial grays. Pieces of summer and spring, reminders that Winter's hold never lasts.

They're intensely hopeful. Free.

I know my father sent them to me to comfort me.