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.  

The Ever changing Persephone

I showed a sketch of my "Persephone's Folly" on my Facebook fan page a couple of days ago. I started painting on her yesterday, and noticed she changed a lot. That often happens when I start painting on them, their faces change and morph on me. I was a little sad at first because there was something in the face of the sketch that I really liked. But now I am realizing there is no way to control Persephone, she is a force that can never be defined or fully understood.
Sketch with some background color added:

Beginnings of skin tone added, she changed already:

Where she is now:

Luckily I don't have to write a novel here telling you all about Persephone. We all know her story, and yet none of us really knows if she ate all those pomegrante seeds on purpose or if she was a victim (I don't think she was a victim).
One thing I am trying to bring through in this painting is the tree of life. In a lot of old paintings a snake is wrapped around a tree to signify it as the tree of life. I have a snake wrapped around Persephone and vegetation in her hair along with the look of her hair to hint to her being the tree. She represents the Underworld, the subconscious, the tree of life that connects to both the Underworld and the Upperworld.
She is also holding the fruit like a tree bearing fruit. I am also paying homage to one of my favorite painters and my favorite Persephone painting. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Proserpine":

May Events and new wip

It's been a busy. busy Spring.  My kids were just on Spring Break and it seems I haven't gotten much done in the way of painting, which has me fearing Summer break.  I have been hard at work getting ready for May though.  I am going to be doing a few fairs starting in May.  The first one is May 1st at Seventh Street Gifts in Newport, Ky.  I will be the featured artist that day during their Spring Sundaze event.  There will be live music provided by Poke, a herbal workshop, food, and readings.  It takes place from 1-5 pm and you can read more about it at the website here.
The next weekend, May 7th-8th, I will have a booth at Mayfest in Lexington.  This will be my first official juried art fair.  I am pretty excited, but also a little stressed.  Anyone who has done a juried art fair will know there is a lot of stuff you need to have to do it.  For instance, most require you have a white canopy tent which are not cheap.  Then there is the structures to hold your art.  The cost is starting to add up, so I will be attempting to do many more of these fairs in the future to justify my expenses :).
  Thanks to my good friend Barbara Glatzeder I will have a whole bunch of pretty cameo art pendants to sell at Mayfest.  I am hopeless when it comes to making these kind of things, so she volunteered to put them together for me and ship them to me all the way from Germany.  I have been hard at work now putting together the chains and cords for them and the ones that are finished are turning out so beautifully.  Mayfest is over Mother's Day weekend, so I am hoping these will be bought for some lucky mamas.

The next weekend in May will be the opening of a group show I will a have a piece in called "Gods and Goddesses" in Richmond, VA.  It will be at an awesome little place called C'est Le Vin Wine and Art Gallery starting May 13th and running to June 5th.  The show will have work from 6 women artists and 6 men artists representing gods and goddesses from around the world.  My Lilith will be there, along with work by some other amazing artists like Helene Ruiz and Lynnette Shelley.  If you live close to Richmond try to make it out for this amazing exhibit.

Lastly, I wanted to share some other big news.  I recently signed on with Kats Magical Patches to license my work on fabric blocks.  These are fabric patches that you can sew on quilts, handbags, throw pillows, or just about anything your heart desires.  This is a new company, but she has already signed on over 60 amazing fantasy artists.  Next month she will be having a little contest amongst the artists on her Facebook fan page.  The fans will like their favorite image and one lucky fan will win a fabric block of the winning design.  Go and become a fan now to participate next month here.

And here is a little preview of the piece I am working on for this little contest.  It is Titania, the Faery Queen.

Magdalene and the red egg

This morning I am thinking of Mary Magdalene.  She comes to me at different moments in my life and when she does her presence is amazing and for me, life changing.  I have been mainly drawn to the Celtic myth for so many years now.  I have by no means covered all that I want to paint there, and yet these Gnostic yearnings come to me now and then and distract me away from the Holy Isles.
I have painted Mary before, but only her face.

I do love the emotion I captured in her face.  I always imagined it as a young Mary Magdalene meeting Yeshua for the first time.  But now I am being pulled to paint a larger work of her.  I am channeling many thoughts about the work right now and I almost feel like I need to write them down before I lose them.  Sometimes I get triggered like this and have strong impulses to create a new work but can't do it immediately and then I lose that space I was in and the thoughts that were flowing. So I thought I would share one piece with you, in an effort to preserve this energy for later.
It starts with Mary and the red egg.  Often in Eastern Orthodox icons Mary is painted holding a blood red egg.  There are a couple of legends that surround this egg, one being that after Jesus died Mary went to the Roman Caesar to tell him about the poor treatment of Jesus by the Romans and that Jesus had risen.  Mary was sitting at dinner and holding an egg in her hand and Caesar responded that Jesus could no more have risen than that egg could turn blood red.  Of course the egg immediately turned blood red.  Another story is similar but has Mary pulling off the same miracle in front of a group of Russians she was telling the tale of Jesus' resurrection to and when the egg went red it marked "The Way" being brought to Russia.
There are many symbols associated with Mary and what intrigues me is their connection to the chakras and the ascension, or the mastery of death.  I am starting with the red egg as I feel it is a strong symbol for the root chakra.  The egg is the creative potential that we hold at our root.  Red is the color of blood, of creation, of the Earth.  Out of the blackness of the womb the egg and the blood create life.  We connect with the creative energies of the Earth through our root chakras.  All possibilities lie in this energy.  By raising this energy up through the chakras to the sacred marriage chamber of the heart (the place where the goddess meets the bridegroom) we transmute the energy into Love, and from there we can conquer death.  We raise it into consciousness at the third eye, where mind, body, and soul align into one.  We take the hidden potential that lay in the egg and bring it into the light of consciousness.
I feel that in this uncertain time that we are in now, connecting with our red egg is more important than ever.  We need to be bathed in those creative energies everyday to be able to create the new reality that is called for.  Once a symbol is unlocked in your consciousness you begin to see it everywhere, and suddenly it makes more sense what it is speaking to you.  Here is another old work of mine called Bindi:

The root chakra is the way to the third eye.  The root is the primal mother Earth goddess creative force.  You have to tap that before you can evolve into the higher realms of consciousness.  Many, many people are stuck in their root because they ignore the goddess.  This only leads to survival issues and greed.  They ignore their own creative potential.  The way to change the world begins at the root.  This seems more apparent than ever as we sit here fearing for the people of Japan as they are dealing with nuclear meltdowns.  We all know that nuclear weapns are the ultimate result of greed, destruction, and fear; and maybe now we know that nuclear power is not so safe an energy source after all.  Then there is Japan's flag, setting there showing us the way to release the fear and "the way" to ascension is through the root.  The red dot on the flag is called the rising sun (son).  It is time to raise the red egg.

Oh, and I just thought of another red dot...the site I put my artwork on Red Bubble.  It is full of creative people working with their red egg energy.

Tiamat-finished

Well, at least I think I am done with her. I worked and worked on her, and changed elements on it over and over. I think I am fairly happy with how she turned out, but my self critic was out in full force with this one towards the end.

I wanted to go into some of the symbolism and my reasoning on this one. Tiamat is usually drawn as a three headed dragon, but I wanted to do this with my own impressions on the myth, and not rely on what I could read in Wikipedia. In the Sumerian myth the generation of creator gods that Tiamat is a part of is referred to as the "Ancient Ones". I believe that these Ancient Ones might have been another race, maybe like the Elven or an Elder race. A less fanciful idea is that they were a matriarchal people that were overtaken by a more warrior-like Patriarchal people. Again the passage that inspired the piece:
"Know that Tiamat seeks ever to rise to the stars, and when the upper is united with the lower, then a New Age will come to the Earth, and the Serpent shall be made whole again, and the waters will be as One."
I believe that this passage is talking a lot about humans having the ability to walk in both worlds, or uniting the spiritual and the material parts of ourselves. This is what we are all asked to do right now. I personally find it a very hard task. I seem to swing from one world to the next, and can not remain in both at once very often.
The stars represent the spiritual, and the lower world is our lower selves, or material selves. Tiamat seeks to rise to the stars, but is held down because the serpent is not one. I represent the serpent in this painting with a coral snake in an ouroboros style. The ouroboros is a well known symbol of the goddess energy. It's mouth represents it's positive active energy, and it's tail represents it's passive negative energy. When it bites it's own tail it is neutralized, it becomes the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I used a coral snake here because they are venomous. When it reaches it's tail it will be one, and neutralized. The masculine aggressive energy neutralized by the feminine.
There are many myths all over the world of an ancient race of wise people known as Serpents or Dragons. I believe this is why Tiamat was called a Dragon, she was part of these ancient wise people that possibly disappeared when the Patriarchal societies took over. Also, the ley lines that run under the earth are often referred to as Dragons. We must be able to converse with these Dragons under the ground and with the stars above to bring on the New Age. Many of those myths that talk about the ancient wise serpent people talk about them retreating underground, like in the myths of the Tuatha de Danann. So maybe they are or were physical beings that went "underground", or maybe they are the Dragon energy that runs through the arteries of our great Gaia. It is something I ponder a lot.
In the painting behind Tiamat's masculine side is a pair of ducks. Ducks represent an energy that lives in water, on land, and in the sky. They are showing us how to walk in both worlds. On her feminine side there is lost of plants and Earth energy. It is the energy of the Earth that helps us connect to the Feminine energy needed to neutralize our abundance of material energy.
Tiamat has three eyes instead of three heads here I suppose. The third eye of course is an Eastern symbol for obtaining inner vision and wisdom. The mist surrounding her represents the veil that surrounds us all and keeps us from seeing beyond the physical world. She is also rising up out of the ocean, or the unconscious. This is what the goddess has been doing for sometime now, rising out of the depths of our unconscious. Tiamat is one of the most ancient goddesses known. When she has fully risen out of our collective unconscious, a New Age will truly be upon us.

Tiamat WIP

I was totally struck by a quote from the ancient Sumerian myth and decided to paint Tiamat. She is the creatrix goddess of the Sumerian cylce. She is connected to serpents and dragons and was killed by her own grandson Marduk. Possibly this is another myth symbolizing the matriarchy being destroyed by the patriarchy, but like most ancient myth, the symbolism is multi-layered. Here is the quote that I couldn't get out of my head:
"Know that Tiamat seeks ever to rise to the stars, and when the upper is united with the lower, then a New Age will come to the Earth, and the Serpent shall be made whole again, and the waters will be as One."
I will go more into my interpretation of that when I have completed Tiamat, but for now I will just post my WIP pics. You will get to see how nuerotic I can be with my backgrounds with this progression.



The above image shows my graphite underdrawing. It is just a rough sketch and the painting usually morphs into something a little different looking than the sketch.



Here I have started to give her a little color and decided to go with black hair again.



More color added. I was thinking I wanted a drippy background here, but was really feeling unsatisfied with it. Basically, at this step, I had no idea what to do with the background. I like to paint the women sort of realistic with a lot of detail and make them the main focus. I like my backgrounds to be more abstract, but I never really know exactly how they will turn out. It is a lot of trial and error.



At this stage I decided to forget the drip, and go with a solid dark blue background.



At this stage I added some kind of circle thingys with drips. I am not sure really why except they look kind of cool. I will come up with some esoteric meaning later maybe. I do plan to paint yet another snake around her in an ouroboros style. I guess the circles will reflect that. I am feeling the power of this goddess and having a great time working on her. Hopefully I will have her done and posted by the end of this week.

The Seer

A 22x24 acrylic on canvas. This is the second in a small series I am doing on the different levels on the spiritual path. This is the Seer. She has begun the process of connecting to her spiritual gifts. She is now eternally walking "between the worlds". This means she has delved into her subconscious mind and has brought light into the darkness. The subconscious mind is represented by the Underworld here and the color red. There is a thin veil, or mist between the two worlds and the doorway in between seems to be her own mind.

The Peacock feather rests at her third eye. Obviously the peacock feather represents the third eye, but it also carries on the theme of alchemy presented with the Seeker. All of the different metals are represented in the peacock feather and it also looks very much like the core of a crystal. Peacocks are also a symbol for transmutation. At this stage on the path the Seer is a trans muter like the peacock. She is constantly transmuting negative energies around her even if she doesn't realize it. Though the Seer is presented with many gifts and can see into worlds others can not, this is the hardest step along the path. She is constantly tested and always teetering on the edge of self-confidence and doubt. She has to find her center point constantly to stay afloat.

Red-winged blackbirds fly out of the Underworld and all around her. Black and Red along with yellow and white are archetypal colors for Mother Earth and the Underworld of creation. According to Ted Andrews in "Animal Speak" the red-winged blackbird's colors connect it to the level known as Binah on the Qabalistic Tree of Life. This is the level associated with the Dark Mother and the primal feminine energies. In a sense, the Seer is releasing these energies into creation. She is the bridge between the worlds that can help these energies return to the Earth.