Okay, this is just weird. I keep a book of images that I've clipped from newspapers and magazines. I use the images in collages or as creative prompts for paintings or just because the image caught my attention for one reason or another. One of the images is a beautiful watercolor of an Asian woman with long black hair and a black kimono. I found this image in a newspaper several years ago.
Imagine my surprise then, when I started flipping through the copy of Dream Hunters that had just arrived today to find the same image. I at least now know who painted it and where it came from. The artist is Yoshitaka Amano. There is a similar image in the book, except the woman is wearing a blue kimono. I would love to get prints of these two paintings.
This is the second time this has happened to me. The first was coming across a wonderful drawing of a character named Niccolo Dei Conti in The Venetian's Wife by Nick Bantock (everybody but everybody should read the Griffin and Sabine trilogy). I got the former book in the late '90s (and btw, it makes use of the still-fairly-new-at-the-time medium of e-mail quite cleverly). About three years ago, I received a book of photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, who is my favorite photographer (she also happens to be Virginia Woolf's great aunt). In it, there is a photograph of Henry Taylor, the poet and essayist, and this photograph was apparently the basis for Nick Bantock's drawing. When I saw the photograph, it took me awhile to remember where I'd seen the image before, and it drove me nuts until I remembered Nick Bantock's book. Oddly, he doesn't credit the image as the basis for the drawing.
Strange, but cool.
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