Years ago, I wrote a snippet of a grand tale just to make it easier to see a painting that I envisioned.

It was great fun to pen the high point of the story but afterward I found it an uninspired tedium to write the rest of the tale.

Each time I’ve tried, I’ve gotten bogged down in it with none of the thrill of the part that I illustrated.

For awhile after that, I’d write poetry and pen little other story snippets with the specific intention of supporting an illustration idea and the rest of the story never got told. Good stories too. I very much like them. But except for a spat of writing fifteen years ago I have not stuck with any of them.

So maybe, good as they are, they still have little chance of becoming fully realized.

Take this one for example. It was such an unusual painting at the time both in subject and colors.

It began when I could feel myself at that spot. I was high in the tree and had rigged up a whole series of events that were an almost desperate attempt to reclaim peace. I felt a tremor. Looking down, I saw the source of it. An enormous tiger had lept on the tree trunk and was hanging on by claws in the bark. It’s tail was twitching in that way that says the hunt is on and the beast is now fully guided by instinct. I was the target.

In the vision I saw the cat from a place that didn’t work as a painting composition, so I drew it somewhat differently.

The setting was prehistoric. The cat had terrorized villages and lives had been lost. The fellow in the story had fallen somewhat out of favor in the community for his bum leg that took him out of the hunting parties. So he had odd jobs like making arrow heads for those who could hunt.

The story had that fellow luring the cat up a tree that stood next to a mesa whose shear walls featured a little cave. He’d rigged the cave to entice the beast but he added a special configuration to it that led to his victory over the cat.

Over the years I thought of how the story might affect the ‘Animals first, people last’ crowd. There was no gain in polishing the story and I shelved it repeatedly.

I was just last week integrating it with another of the old stories and just as before, it stalled in the setup.

To this day I still see it vividly.

Here is the moment when the mans scheme is activated by the cat.