"Nimue", a white hart, and a goat?

"Nimue"

16x20 acrylic on masonite

2012

Tammy Mae Moon

I finally got to finish this up this week.  I have been working on it in spurts for weeks now.  My original plan was to paint Nimue, one of the names for the Lady of the Lake, and a white hart.  While I was working on her a goat appeared, and I really had no idea why at the time.  It wasn't until I really started to think about the symbolism of the goat that it hit me why he was there.  I figured I had better do some "splaining".

First, Nimue is a goddess that has always intrigued me.  We know that she was one of the ladies of the lake, and that she was an enchantress.  Supposedly she used her feminine ways to seduce the great wizard Merlin into teaching her all of his magic, then she used this magic to entrap him in a tower, or in some stories a hawthorn tree.  Some of you may remember one of my older works from 2009 "Merlin and Nimue":

 You can imagine how the Patriarchy loved this tale of an evil temptress destroying the powers of the greatest wizard.  One who really studies the writings of the courtly love era, the Camelot myths, certainly will understand the story differently though.   The writers of these Courtly love tales believed that all women were to be honored as the goddess, and it was through the love of the goddess that man transcended this world and became immortal.

Merlin would have been able to predict his own death, and yet he willingly hung out with Nimue. In one tale Nimue changes him into a hawthorn tree. The hawthorn tree to the ancient Celts was the symbol for the chalice itself (the Holy Grail). It held the divine secrets of everlasting life. Therefore Merlin became one with those divine secrets by way of Nimue (the goddess).


Now the white hart appears a lot in Camelot myths too.  Usually it is the hunt for the white hart that leads the knights into the forest, or the Otherworld.  It represents the legendary beast of the chase and represents both heavenly and earthly love and is similar to the symbol of the unicorn in medieval lore.  It represents innocence, and the goddess of the land.  It leads you into the Otherworld where you will be forever changed.


The goat has been a strong symbol through out history.  It was sacrificed routinely by ancient cultures so it represents sacrifice.  But it is also represented by strong virile, wild male gods like Pan.  Of course we have all used the phrase "horny old goat".  Goats represent that wild, sexual, masculine energy that drives the world to procreate.


So these two animals represent two facets of Nimue.  That innocent, pure feminine goddess of the land, and that wild, evil, sexual temptress that she has become and the goat represents the sacrifice of the land.  In between these two animals is a healthy large heart.  The heart of the goddess being fed by opposites.


So there is some of my thoughts on this one, at least the ones I can form somewhat coherently.

New wip and a rant

Haven't posted much this month.  I have been real busy painting and getting ready for this coming weekend's showing and next weekend's juried art show.  I promised you a rant in the title so here goes....
People who complain about art costing too much have no idea the amount of work that goes into being an artist.  I think most people think artists just happily paint for a few hours everyday and that is it.  We also collectively have this idea that to earn lots of money we must be working extremely hard at something we hate.
I wish that all I had to do was paint, but that alone would still take up a big chunk of my time.  Each painting I do takes me anywhere from 12 to 40 hours to complete, depending on size and difficulty.  This is usually spread out over many days, painting anywhere from 3 to 6 hours a day.  Once a painting is complete I have to varnish, wire, and sometimes frame.  Varnishing alone can take me hours to do, as I seem to have bad luck with it and often have to go repaint things I messed up with the varnish.  I do all my own framing and this is by no means easy or quickly done.
The other time consuming aspect of being an artist is the copying of your work, or taking photographs, scanning, etc.  I spend a lot of time photographing my pieces.  I have to do it outside on a good weather day.  This can be challenging at best.  Then I have to edit all my pieces in Photoshop to make them as close to the real work as possible to post online.  All of this can take me anywhere from 3 to 5 hours to do, on just one piece of art.  Next you spend time uploading art to all of your websites where you sell prints, Etsy, Red Bubble, etc.  This can often take up an afternoon.
Next you have making prints, packaging prints, shipping prints, making other things to sell like pendants (this takes up lots of time).  So if you add all this up we are going over 40 hours of work a week. 
Pricing your art is one of the hardest parts of being an artist.  What is it's value?  That is a hard question.  We certainly do not get paid for our time.  Just to make a nice round $10 bucks an hour we would have to sell a $400 painting a week, every week.  Then there is the obscure question of how good is it.  We all have seen artwork that sells for thousands that we wouldn't pay $10 for, and ones that sell for $100 that seem to be worth a lot more.
My pricing is random and somewhat based on how much I am attached to the work, and the size of the piece.  I am usually flexible though, and willing to hear offers of course.
Okay, that is about it for my rant, although I haven't even mentioned the high cost of art supplies.  Most of you reading this are artists too, so I am probably preaching to the choir.  But many of my friends that are not artists, even my own husband, have no idea what I do all day.  Somehow I have to fit in cleaning the house, grocery shopping, and taking care of my kids and myself in all of this.  Oh, and I left out the self-promotion on the internet time....like this blog....there is another few hours a day, just trying to get your work out there and seen (advertising).
Okay, on to my current work in progress.  I have been experimenting with different surfaces.  This one is small because it is a sample that I got from Raymar of one of their polyflax cotton canvas panels.  It is a very nice surface that I will definately try again.  It is also what sparked my rant, because it is only 9x12 inches, but I have already put about 12 hours into painting it and am still not totally done.  Just because it is smaller than many of my other works does not mean it is worth less.  I am also really loving it, it has changed a lot already from this pic I am posting now.

The Guardians, new WIP

Well the summer is almost over and I have felt uninspired most of the time. I had to paint a couple of paintings for upcoming themed exhibits. One was for the Tomato Art Festival in East Nashville on August 14th and the other was for a traveling exhibit called "The Womanly Art" that is being put on by the Southern Indiana La Leche League. Although I was very excited to paint both of these, my inspiration was slow to come, and both works took me longer than I had originally planned. Both works are finished now and posted on my redbubble profile.
I have had another work in my mind for weeks now. I had to wait to start her until I was finished with the before mentioned works. That was slightly hard for me. This painting began to permeate my every thought. I think I learned a lesson in patience though. I felt like I let the idea grow for awhile in my womb before I finally got to birth her, and I think the work is better because of this.
The piece is about the shift of consciousness that we are all going through right now. The energy is shifting all around us, whether we realize it or not. This work carries along the themes of "I Feel Fragile Today". The energies are going through us and we feel uncomfortable because we feel we are changing, but we don't really know what is happening to us. In this work I am trying to show that it is our connection to nature that will help guide us through this change.
The Guardians is a large 2x3 foot acrylic on canvas. Here she is in the early sketch phase.


And here is a detail of her face.


Here she is with the face coming to life and a bit of color in the background.


And then I worked her face some more. This is what she looks like right now.


I started painting her yesterday and was up way too late working on her. I am feeling like I am in complete painting bliss with her. I have a lot of detail to do on her that might take me a few weeks and I have a couple of trips coming up to see family. My kids start school again, already, in about 2 weeks. My time to paint is going to really open up then. I feel the Fall will bring lots of creations.