Lonesome Ocean 15X38 Pastel and pencil on paper

The title Lonesome Ocean comes from Bob Dylan's Boots of Spanish Leather

No, there's nothin' you can send me, my own true love
There's nothin' I'm wishin' to be ownin'
Just carry yourself back to me unspoiled
From across that lonesome ocean

According to Greek myth, anemone flowers were created from the blood of Adonis when Venus, his lover, mixes it with nectar as she grieves over his dying body. There are two sources of the text, one a direct quote from the myth of Ovid, the other a work by A.F. Moritz entitled Orpheus.

​The death of Adonis
And yet not everything is in your power she said. Adonis, there shall be an everlasting token of my grief.

Orpheus
By A. F. Moritz
He glanced around to check if the treacherous gods
had really given him the reward promised for his accomplished song
and there she was, Eurydice restored...

Orpheus listened patiently to my poem and when it quieted he said
to me:
That wasn't it at all. I sang outward from my face to blue spaces
between clouds,
to fern fronds, and men and women sipped my song as you drink
from a stream going by.
What I sang is lost in time, you don't know what it was, all you have
is your own
old stories about me. And if women tore me into pieces, maybe that
only signifies
each one keeps part of my body, which is melody among visible
things.

​Lonesome Ocean takes on the colors of two kinds of anemone - a green waving sea anemone and a bloody-purple anemone flower. The green sea anemone and its red coral substrate surround the blue land anemone in the center of the drawing.