A small tribute in progress...

One of the themes (for want of a better name) that ran through several of Robert Holdstock's books was the magic of masks.  I've always felt masks to be powerful and strange and a little scary.  They figure in so many cultures around the world, including my own (Ned Kelly would probably not be half the legend he is without his magnificent one), and hold great and deep significance.  There are ten masks that appear first in Robert Holdstock's Lavondyss , but reappear in his other books.  When I first read the passages about these masks, I almost felt I was holding my breath in the presence of something truly ancient...they spoke to me, and have entered my own personal mythology (doesn't everyone have one?) and have evolved and melded and changed and grown in my imagination, and I have added my own to his original ten.  And thinking about them yesterday, I started another little pencil drawing, unfinished as yet, but I thought I'd post it to see what you all think.  This is Sinisalo, The Child in the Land.  And here are Robert Holdstock's own thoughts on the masks that appear in his stories.

"In Lavondyss I introduced ten masks that I believe may have been a part of our earliest culture. Call them spirit masks, or shaman masks, or Old Land masks, or Dreamtime masks (which I do)… call them anything. But they represent the great encounter of our earliest conscious minds with the curiosity and memory that is such an important part of what makes us human. New mythology juxtaposed with what we know.....For myself, I have been ‘dreaming’ Ryhope Wood for more than twenty years, now. I live at its edge, half asleep in reality. Then I hear the sounding of a horn, or the howling of a hound. Someone or some thing steps out from the edge of the wood, and beckons to me. And once again, it’s time to wake up. Time to journey."

He has gone on the greatest journey.