STORM WARNING
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| © JODY A. LEE |
Oils, gold enamel, 12/93, 28"x13", signed lower left.
This wonderful painting, done for Book One of the Mage Storm Trilogy, shows Karal, a young diplomat from Karse, Altra, a magical firecat, and the Valdemar Companion Florian looking up in alarm at the first waves of the mage storm. Karal holds a heavy magical tome to symbolize his research on the origins of the storm, while Altra the firecat looks elsewhere, as disinterested any cat could be. They are standing in the fields about the Collegium in Haven while in the color streaked sky above them appears the Sun God of Karse, the avatars of the Hawkbrothers, and the "Star-Eyed" Goddess of the Shin'a'in, who have warned each of their peoples of the impending disaster.
This is such an interesting, beautiful piece, the only painting I did for a Mercedes Lackey novel in oils. I haven't done another because the amount of fine detail involved was hard to control with a media so naturally messy as oil. This painting is very unusually long too, for I made a separate and very fancy border decoration for the cover, and I thought the top part with the deities could go on the backcover. But it was just too hard to fit with type, so I ended up doing two separate paintings for the next book in the series. My Valdemar covers began with inspiration from Gustav Klimt and this painting definitely carries on that tradition. There's also a bit of aurora borealis in the storm waves in the sky, with golden triangles of darting magic. The Companion is iridescent and delicate, while Altra is as gracefully aloof as any Siamese fancier could wish. This painting is available already framed.