Lucy In the House of the Magician

1993

This is a piece I began but never finished. It depicts a scene from the C.S.Lewis book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Young Lucy has crept into the library of a mysterious magician in order to find a specific incantation in his great spell book.

The picture contains a number of “in-jokes”: the Fergus family coat of arms (a rearing lion) is on the side of the trunk; an alarm clock sits on the table; a silver quaich my wife and I received as a wedding gift sits on a bookshelf; a stained-glass fish a friend (Cindy) made for me is by one of the windows; and the strange writing on the podium is J.R.R.Tolkein’s Elfish for “Hi Steve, Amy.”