Bride of the Silver Grail

“Up the stairs of the leaning stone tower, in the wan light of the candlelit study, between the cherry shelves, above the mantelpiece looms the portrait of the Bride of the Silver Grail, the Mistress of the Moon.”

This portrait of Tea Booth was officially the very first in 2019’s Portraits from a Distant Era series (which currently greets visitors to the Distant Era website). It was the first one posted, an opening statement of intent on the kind of work I wanted to do from then on. It was also entirely spontaneous.

Spontaneous is a word I closely associate with Tea. I know her through role-playing games, where she’s one of the cleverest, wittiest, and most inventive proponents of “yes-and” I’ve ever met. I once did an improvised scene where my character suggested, and attempted to justify, that we were all bees in a hive. Tea walked into the scene and instantly embraced the reality without question, adding more and more evidence that we were all, in fact, bees. She then rattled off a series of bee facts that left me stupefied, speechless. I asked her where she did her improv training, and the answer was nowhere. She’s just one of those people who can take any situation and make it better.

Tea wasn’t initially involved in the portraits series. She in town visiting our friends a week before her wedding (hence the title of this entry) on the day we were shooting it. Our friends Rae and Jesse were participating in the series and asked if Tea might come along.

I said sure she can come—and let’s get her something to wear and something to hold, and she can be in it.

And thus did Tea make it through the rigorous casting process, and being naturally spontaneous, she improvised a costume from what she had, grabbed a grail, and there we were.

2021 Revision

As I prepare the Portraits from a Distant Era series for print, lifting the areas where my 2019 edits were completely black, I noticed that those dark areas in the background of this portrait were somewhat murky and contained some rough, noisy patches. To fix these problems, I adjusted the shadows so that they were more or less uniform across the background, and then I brought in a subtle texture to cover up those noisy areas. Then I added “cobwebs” of darkness in the corners to bring back the feeling of the original edit, while keeping the details present. As usual, I didn’t retouch the original image.

I was happy to have the opportunity to make this portrait a week before Tea’s wedding and hope that it always brings happy memories of that time in all years to come.

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.