Description
10″x10″ watercolor on paper.
This painting was inspired by a quote from 19th century art critic, John Ruskin:
“There is not a war in the world, no, nor and injustice, but you women are answerable for it; not in that you have provoked, but in that you have not hindered.
“Do you remember reading in Marmion, how the young woman who accompanied him in his wars, dressed as a page, buckled on his armor?
“The buckling on of the knight’s armor by his lady’s hand was not a mere caprice of romantic fashion. it is the type of an eternal truth that the soul’s armor is never well set to the heart unless a woman’s hand has braced it, and it is only when she braces it loosely, that the honor of manhood fails.”
This was among my first watercolors and was one of my earliest experiments using reference images to compose an image of my own imagining.
It won both the first place and people’s choice awards at the Artfest 2001 in Newhall, CA. It was the first of my paintings to win any award in a show.
