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Witches’ Flowers: The Art of Rosalie Lettau
The daintily dotted pencil, graphite, and digital illustrations of Rosalie Lettau are full of goats, witches, flowers, and sharp-nailed, enveloping hands. There is a grainy texture to the blacks as of careful static, as well as a poetic luminance to the whites. The themes hint at a folkloric world where witches sign compacts with the devil, where they choose armfuls of lovely flowers which obscure their faces, where youths lie down in fields dreaming of a life beyond their known boundaries, and where the witches are hunted down and hanged from trees along with their familiars. It seems as if both the witches and the witch hunters come from the same seemingly peaceful place, a place where maidens either slowly dream their lives away, or turn to the occult arts. Each subject is a rustic figure in a mythical village, a sleeping village that presents both its light, wistful face, and its dark, mysterious, and demonic face. The darkness resides in the persecution and death of witches, even more so than in the maiden-witches’ tokens to Satan.
