illustrated world of virginia frances sterrett

Blondine and the Tortoise

Europa and the Bull

Old French Fairy Tales

Blondine Threw Her Arms Around the Deer

Medea and the Snakes

Proserpina and the Sea Nymphs

Virginia Frances Sterrett
When Sterrett reached 19, two things happened: first, she received 
a commission to illustrate her very first book called Old French 
Fairy Tales by Comtesse de Segur.  Second, she came down with 
tuberculosis which soon began to sap her strength.  The race was on.
For the rest of her short life, Sterrett worked as hard as her failing 
strength would allow, illustrating Tanglewood Tales, 
the Arabian Nights, and Myths and Legends.

By the time she turned 22, she had to enter a sanatorium where she
could only work for short periods of time before resting.  Yet, Sterrett's
exhaustion does not show up in her pictures.  You do not see her
taking shortcuts or compromising the quality of her work.  She seemed
intent on making her pictures perfect, to isolate them from the 
limitations and frustrations of her life.
Virginia knew the game was fixed against her; she will not have a 
lifetime to improve her skills or compile a major body of work.
The work under those restrictions might have made sense to give
up or resort to drink, but still she persisted.  The time was devoted to
making pictures. She was almost finished with Myths and Legends when she passed 
into the spirit world.

The local newspaper, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, ran an obituary that
remarked upon the disparity between her life and exotic world
she drew:

Virginia's life spent in prosaic places of the West and Middle West,

she made pictures of haunting loveliness, suggesting Oriental lands

she never saw and magical realms no one ever knew except in the 

dreams of childhood....Perhaps it was the hardships of her own life

that gave the young girl's work its fanciful quality.  In the imaginative

scenes she set down on paper, there must have been an escape from

the harsh actualities of existence.

the little people, rackham, and the trees

     The images above are illustrations from Arthur Rackham, an extraordinary perception of nature, little people, and storytelling.  Another powerful reminder that trees are the roots to grand life here on earth is the writing from Ursula K. LeGuin.  
Direction of the Road from The Wind's Twelve Quarters, 1975
     The tree stands just south of the McMinnville bypass on Oregon State Highway 18.  It lost a major limb last year, and it has never failed to uphold Relativity with dignity and the skill of long practice.
     "They did not use to be so demanding.  They never hurried us into anything more than a gallop, and that was rare; most of the time it was just a jigjog foot-pace.  And when one of them was on his own feet, it was a real pleasure to approach him.  There was time to accomplish the entire act with style.
..I'd approach him steadily but quite slowly, growing larger all the time, synchronizing the rate of approach and rate of growth perfectly, so that at the very moment that I'd finished enlarging from a tiny speck to my full size--sixty feet in those days--I was abreast of him and hung above him, loomed, towered, over-shadowed him.  Yet he would show no fear.  Not even the children were afraid of me, though often they kept their eyes on me as I passed by and started to diminish."