My painting was inspired by William Henry Hudson's heroine in Green Mansions, a turn-of-the-century novel which takes place in Guiana.

Green Mansions is the romance of the bird-girl Rima, a story which immortalizes as passionate a love of beautiful things as ever was in the heart of man. Hudson's personal philosophy that, "The sense of the beautiful is God's best gift to the human soul". So it is, and to pass that gift on to others would surely have given happiness to the author who wrote

Green Mansions. The story symbolizes the yearning of the human soul for the attainment of perfect love and beauty in this life- that impossible perfection which we must all learn to see fall from its high tree and be consumed in the flames as was Rima the bird-girl, but whose fine ashes we gather that they may be mingled at last with our own.

Excerpted from Green Mansions:

"Listen, Rima," I said, "was that a hummingbird we saw a little while ago? You are like that, now dark, a shadow in the shadow, seen for an instant, and then - gone, oh, little thing! And now in the sunshine standing still, how beautiful! - thousand times more beautiful than the hummingbird. Listen, Rima, you are like all beautiful things in the wood - flower, and bird, and butterfly, and green leaf, and frond, and little silky-haired monkey high up in the trees. When I look at you I see them all - all and more, a thousand times, for I see Rima herself. And when I listen to Rima's voice, talking in a language I cannot understand, I hear the wind whispering in the leaves, the gurgling running water, the bee among the flowers, the organ-bird singing far, far away in the shadows of the trees. I hear them all, and more, for I hear Rima."

Carolyn Johnson Hamric