You Make my Heart Sing

Here we have a wild thing. His name is Ralph (pronounced Rafe).

Here starts the rambling! (reading it is optional)

Ralph has been with me a long time, a loooong time. He didn't have a name, but he certainly had a face, which I always found immensely comforting, strangely. In terms of a story (because everyone has to have one) he, along with other things helped to build the world in which he lives and started out as a spirit of the Wild, of lonely places and of wild things and of the hunt. As the years passed, he found that he liked to talk to lost travellers and to people that went to the woods to be alone, or because they felt that there was nowhere else to go. People started to call him The Listener of the Lost. He is the quiet, warm feeling that you sometimes get when everything seems like it is terrible, that someone, somewhere is there for you and listening. I've been lucky enough to feel it a few times, and he is the face that always came with it. In one sense, I guess that you could say that he is a very small god, because what else is a listening spirit? But he's not very good at being godly.

He is a very shy chap and for years he dodged being introduced to anyone else on the grounds that he was a bit silly, or not a proper figment of my imagination but recently he has been coaxed out.

On a purely mechanical level, he is not an anthropomorphisation of one single animal, but a mixture of many. A catlike muzzle, ram's horns, red deer ears, cow hooves, a lemur-like tail, shaggy fur almost like a musk ox, wolf eyes and a humanoid stance. He can howl like a wolf or growl like a tiger, he has the teeth of a predator, the tail is completely prehensile and when I was small, he was often hanging upside down by it in my mind's eye.

I guess that he got put together from reading 'Where the Wild Things Are', 'Beauty and the Beast' in a wonderfully illustrated fairytale book that my parents gave me, watching Labyrinth and reading Wind in the Willows. The result was the chap that you see before you!

The landscape in which he stands is utterly improbable and is not meant to make any sense whatsoever but it is where he always lived and so that is where he is!

Rambling over, it's safe to look now!

Sketched in HB mechanical pencil, the unpainted version of which can be seen here [link]
and painted in watercolours.