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.  

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.