Last summer, I purchased a book named "Gioconda " by British writer Lucille Turner, an excellent historical fiction of Leonardo da Vinci's life. I love the way the book opens inside the mind of the solitary boy Leonardo roaming the countryside,
being fascinated by mechanics of butterflies, watching rivers to see exactly how water moves, collecting dead animals to dissect.
"A small boy knee deep in meadow flowers of humming violet, blazing white, is lost in a cloud of butterflies. He holds out his net,..., and waves it through the air, making eddies and currents but catching only sunlight. He flies this way and that, chasing wings that do not want to be caught, until finally he gives up, sits on a clump of moss and watches the stream instead...Time for another approach, he thinks. Let the butterfly come to you. He sits still and waits..."
Immediately after reading these sentences, I began to make a sketch of a small boy standing in the middle of a wild flower meadow and observing a lek of colorful butterflies dancing in the air. For some inexplicable reason I didn't feel like finishing the drawing and just left it undone until yesterday.
