Who is Melusine?

What I am currently working on is a painting of Melusine.  I have been wanting to paint her for a long time and am really excited to finally do so.  So who was or is Melusine?  Quite simply she was an extremely popular legend in Medieval times.  Her myth was popular throughout Europe from Scotland, to Avalon (though it is suppose to be a mythical place), to France.  Here is my shortened and quick synopsis of what Wikipedia says:


Melusine is a figure of  European legend, a feminine spirit of fresh waters in sacred springs and rivers.
She is usually depicted as a woman who is a serpent or fish from the waist down.  She is also sometimes illustrated with wings and a tail, sometimes two tails.  

During the Crusades Elynas, the King of Albany (Scotland) went hunting one day and came across a beautiful lady in the forest. She was Pressyne, mother of Melusine. He persuaded her to marry him but she agreed, only on the promise — for there is often a hard and fatal condition attached to any pairing of faerie and mortal — that he must not enter her chamber when she birthed or bathed her children. She gave birth to triplets. When he violated this taboo, Pressyne left the kingdom, together with her three daughters, and traveled to the lost Isle of  Avalon.

The three girls — Melusine, Melior, and Palatyne — grew up in Avalon. On their fifteenth birthday, Melusine, the eldest, asked why they had been taken to Avalon. Upon hearing of their father's broken promise, Melusine sought revenge. She and her sisters captured Elynas and locked him, with his riches, in a mountain. Pressyne became enraged when she learned what the girls had done, and punished them for their disrespect to their father. Melusine was condemned to take the form of a serpent from the waist down every Saturday. In other stories, she takes on the form of a mermaid.

Raymond of Poitou came across Melusine in a forest of Coulombiers in France, and proposed marriage. Just as her mother had done, she laid a condition, that he must never enter her chamber on a Saturday. He broke the promise and saw her in the form of a part-woman part-serpent. She forgave him. When during a disagreement, he called her a "serpent" in front of his court, she assumed the form of a dragon, (sometimes a it is said a swan) provided him with two magic rings, and flew off, never to return.

To me Melusine is the ultimate "Animal Bride".  I am super intrigued by the Animal Bride myth in mythology and often my work is of these faerie women.  These are the stories of the swan maidens, the selkies, mermaids, etc.  They are in almost all myth the world over.  They are tales of human men that marry a faerie woman who is some sort of animal, but turns into a beautiful looking human woman when the man captures her and brings her into our world to marry her.

There is so much good symbolism in the Animal Bride myth.  Mainly I think it represents our longing for an intimacy with nature, but how we usually try to possess and control her.  The Animal Bride myth always ends with the faerie woman returning to the wild from which she came, as she can never be possessed by man.

I am guessing these tales began popping up as soon as humans began creating civilizations.  As we moved out of the forests and became increasingly dispossessed from nature, so began our longing to return to her.  I think Melusine is the ultimate Animal Bride because she combines just about all the myths into one.  She is a serpent, swan, dragon, mermaid of sorts.  Her tale stretches across Europe and is not concentrated in one place.  She is connected to springs and bodies of fresh water as these are so representative of our subconscious selves that are always there whispering secrets we can not hear like bubbling brooks.

So here are a couple of wip pics of my Melusine.

The above shot is of the acrylic underpainting of Melusine.  I added a serpent and a swan in a sort of oroboros design (one of my favorite symbols).  They represent her two tails, or her two natures, earthly and spiritual.  

This is a shot of her after a layer of oil.  I still have more detailing to do, but you get an idea of what she will look like.

One thing I am noticing in my own art, and in a lot of contemporary art, is that my women are growing more child-like or innocent looking.  For me the underlying message in all my works has always had something to do with our longing for that connection with nature that is slowly slipping away from us.  I think the prevalence of these fragile, innocent women we are seeing so much in art these days has to do with that too. The more entrenched we get in this technological world, the more we long for a simpler time. We are longing for a more innocent time. We stare at our computer screens all day long and the stress of this technological filled lifestyle often makes us feel like robots, not alive.  We long to be wild.   We all have memories of being children, running in the woods.  Somehow that seems like lifetimes away now, why can't we have that again?

Okay, enough writing for today....off to finish my Melusine.  

WIP "Deirdre of the Sorrows"

A couple of weeks ago I decided to start working on a Deirdre of the Sorrows. Deirdre is one of the most tragic characters of Pre-Christian Irish Myth. Her story comes from the Ulster cycle and has all the makings of a classic fairy tale, except for a very unhappy ending. I originally just wanted to paint a Celtic goddess that was known for her otherworldly beauty and was drawn to Deirdre. Her story is a little bit like Helen of Troy, a beautiful woman that causes the ruin of kings and warriors, but the symbolism of the story is so rich I couldn't resist painting it.
There are many versions of this story, at least 5 plays and 4 books have been written about her, and although the stories vary slightly, the basic theme is the same. So Deirdre is born to a royal storyteller in the court of the king Conchobar. A Druid priest prophesied when she was born that she would be the ruin of the king and the kingdom because of her great beauty. She was almost put to death for this, but the king was so intrigued by her future beauty that he decided to keep her alive and marry her when she grew up. He placed her in foster care hidden away from others.
Here is where the story starts to intrigue me. She lives in a house hidden under the ground (faerie dwelling=sidhe) and is mainly cared for by an old woman named Leabharcham. Leabharcham is the wise crone goddess and/or possibly a high priestess of the old ways. One day Deirdre looks out and sees her foster father slaughtering a young calf during the winter as there is snow on the ground. This in itself is strange because in the old faerie lore you did not slaughter animals after the Blood moon in late October or early November. Any animal or grain harvested after this time belonged to the Fay or the dead ancestors and would harm the living if they partook of it.
So Deirdre looks out at the scene and sees a raven come and start to nibble at the blood on the snow. Most people would see this as some kind of dark omen, but Deirdre sees her future lover and proclaims that she would like to have a lover like that with hair the color of a raven, lips as red as blood, and skin as white as snow. At this point one might be reminded of Snow White, and one should be. The white as snow, red as blood or rubies, and black as the raven is like a code in fairy tales. White, red, and black are the colors of the Dark goddess and of the Faerie realm. I think that Deirdre is claiming her lover to be the goddess, or rather stating her love for the goddess here.
So the symbolism has laid the hints. Deirdre is in the faerie realm. She is between and betwixt the worlds, just like Snow White was when she entered the dark forest and met the gnomes (or dwarfs if you want to call them that). She soon meets this raven haired pale skinned Marilyn Mansion looking lover named Naoise. She runs away with him and lives in some forest in Scotland for awhile and lives blissfully happy there for a moment.
Eventually they have to return to Ireland. In a nutshell, Conchobar succeeds in having Naoise killed, marries Deirdre but she is miserable and kills herself. In one account she knocks her head on a boulder as her carriage is passing it. So what is the meaning of all this tragedy? Like most myth, the meaning is multi-layered, but one meaning seems to come out at me. I think in part, this story is about the old matriarchal Bronze age goddess societies being taken over by the more Patriarchal warrior ones. I think it is trying to warn people that the way of war and Patriarchy is a road only to greed and ruin.
Deirdre is the sovereign goddess in this tale, as at that time a king was still not truly a king unless he was married to the sovereign goddess. She was the living representative of the goddess and the Earth or the land. If we are too greedy with her, if we take advantage of her, she will perish and so will our kingdoms.
Okay, so now on to my painting. It is a lot of pressure to try and paint a face that would cause the downfall of so many men. Hopefully I captured her beauty and otherworldliness here:












You can see the pencil workings of a raven that will be carrying a serpent shaped golden torque. In some accounts of the story Deirdre has a dream right before Naoise is killed of hundreds of ravens flying with bloody torques in their mouths. I think this is a strong symbol for the story as a whole. Gold and white are similar in their symbolic meaning, and I am painting the torque (which was worn around warriors necks) in the oroborus style to again symbolize the goddess.

As always, I hope to have this finished this week....we will see. I am leaving you with a photo of me in the Underworld of Faerie (or better known as Cathedral Caverns in Northern Alabama) surrounded by the energy of gnomes.