The Lost Child

“Adrift on a silent sea.
The cold night surrounds me.
Black ice forms beneath
The waves of a childhood dream.
A far light hypnotised,
A voice calls from paradise, paradise
To here.

My light is fading now,
My heart is breaking now.
My light is fading now,
My heart is breaking now.

A child sings to me.
The mists rise blinding me.
I can’t find a way out of here
And the sound of angel dreams.
The stars fall into the sea.
The ice breaks, I’m pulled beneath,
Pulled beneath the waves.

My light is fading now,
My heart is breaking now.
My life is failing now,
My mind is drowning now.

But your hand reaches down
To reach down and pull me out and
Save me, save me, save me, save me,
Save me, save me, save me, save me,
Save me, save me, save me, save me.”

[ The Lost Child – Anathema ]

I’m getting the distinct impression that the Weather Systems project is like “everything or nothing at all”: first one year of silence, and then two works in two days. Consider I’ve got 75% of Internal Landscapes done and am just waiting for weather to be cooperative to complete it and you get what I mean. 

So, here is The Lost Child. Truth be told, it has proved to be quite a challenge for me. It was the first song which gave me a mental image for a photo, like the very first time I heard it: I thought of a monochromatic  half-naked me hidden in the woods (something similar to Shaman, but darker). This happened before I read the lyrics, which unfortunately did not mach my idea at all: as much as I liked it, among the icy sea, mist air and starry night, there was no place for woods.

Eventually, as I grew fonder and fonder of the album and the idea of a series of colour diptych stuck, I had to rule my original concep for this work even further out, but I couldn’t quite get it out of my head completely: this resulted in me shelving the song for time being and waiting to be near the completion of the project to face it again. Which is, like, now.

Then, the day after yesterday my mother and I went to the pinewood where we buried our cat Murka to pay her a visit, then wandered a bit around in search of some photographic ideas in the inspiring gloomy weather. The pinewood is right by the beach and as soon as I saw a view of the stormy sea through the trees, I got inspired and decided to revamp my original idea for The Lost Child with a bit of variation to fit the marine theme. After all, nighttime portraiture in a non-urban, non-arc-lit environment is currently far beyond my reach, fat chance I ever get a misty night in either of the two notoriously windy cities by the sea I live in, let alone ice sheets. I had muky weather, I had a distant light(house), I had the eerie-looking grove I wanted, so there we are.