Storm Scene in The Tempest, Raphaella Yang, Digital Drawing• Robert Gerst, Digital Editing•”Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies,” Vocal by Alfred Deller

Professor Albert Lafarge passes along this note from Literary Traditions student Raphaella Yang:

“After I read what happened to the ship at sea in Shakespeare’s The Tempest,” Raphaella Yang writes, “I  began imagining…how the storm, the thunder, the lightning, the fire, the waves and human cries would shake dramatically. The scene reminded me of the sinking ship in Titanic and the shipwreck in Life of Pi. But in The Tempest, resentful Prospero compels the storm and Ariel raises it. All that happens seems due to the force of nature, but Prospero has plotted all and left no clue save the freshness of mariners’ garments.

 

I remembered ‘the hand’ of divine  instruction so common in art I saw in my Early Christianity and Byzantine art course. In my digital drawing, Prospero’s  hand secretly conducts from the top right corner.”

The hand she incorporates into her drawing? She discovered it in a 1829 painting by John White Abbot.