Two cats and a good book
(watercolor illustration on paper, 2005)
"Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it."
P.J. O'Rourke
"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
Mark Twain
"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
Ray Bradbury
"Never judge a book by its movie."
J.W. Eagan
I imagined the woman in this illustration as a legal secretary named Zelda Johns. Zelda lives in the late 1950's and works for a small and badly run law firm in Boston. She is single, hard-working and likes to keep to herself. She spends all of her free time reading in the company of her two cats.
A dreamer and explorer by nature she hopes to see the world outside of Boston one day. Her salary is not enough to travel the world just yet, so Zelda reads to satisfy her curiosity. Zelda imagines herself as a heroine of every book she reads, which at times makes her regular life seem rather boring.
However, Zelda is a very smart woman and her intelligence keeps her from getting depressed. She understands that the disadvantage of being a well-read person is always having a feeling that you could get more out of life, but the advantage of being smart is that you’re able to realize that you can be perfectly satisfied with having less.
