Page:Woman in Art.djvu/90

WOMAN IN ART her leafy environment. As light and sound waves meet, they have seemed to produce the translucent figure from the brush of a sympathetic artist, Seifert. He felt his subject or his skill could not have produced it.

One more example of fancy and illusiveness that links the spirit of the himan with that of nature,—"A Woodland Sprite" at home in the embracing arms of an old oak that nourishes the mystic mistletoe, and keeps the secret of the Sprite.

Akin to these evanescent beings, another lover of nature portrayed the oneness of soul with the spirit of the trees. The spirit of the woman is in touch with æolian voices of the pines; she would cntchcatch [sic] and hold them to the rhythm of her heart. So do voices of nature—God-endowed—give unspeakable tones to soulful memories. The art of Douglas Volk assists the appreciation of this beautiful relation of the human heart to nature voices; but there needs must be the listening ear.

In the more difficult medium of marble, Mr. Daniel C. French has delicately expressed "The Spirit of Life." The soul of the artist has animated his hand—has animated the stone with vim and vigor, till the young girl, her foot on the fountain of life, responds to life. The golden bowl, of the elixir of life is held to her utmost height, and the wings symbolize the fleetness of existence.

Elihu Vedder has been a daring painter from his youth up. His imagination is boundless. Woman has been the motif and vehicle whereby his fancy has roamed the universe. Astronomy interests more people than in former years, yet few artists dip the brush for the romance of the stars. Mr. Vedder has done it many times, reaching the helium light of suns by his helium speed of thought, drawing them earthward to serve his art. When his fertile imagination led him to depict "The Fates Gathering In The Stars," he essayed a subject of cosmic breadth on something less than a three-by-four-foot canvas. The color scheme is perfect to the subject; ashen grays garb the Fates, and their girdles of flame red, metallic green, and gaseous blue, flung afar, gather remote suns and derelict worlds to their abode in the everlasting darkness of cosmos.

The artistic claims no originality for the Fates of mankind in the cosmic world. It is an age-old fact, that destiny rests in the power of the feminine element; but Mr. Vedder has been the most original symbolic painter in modern art.

Consider "The Pleiades," the seven beautiful daughters of Atlas transformed into a sisterhood of stars. Not being of the earth earthy, their forms can afford 66