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Goodbye Jesus

The 3 Eves


godlessgrrl

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So I've posted one of these in another thread and thought I'd post all 3 of 'em here.

 

My last semester of art school I started getting into collage bigtime. 2 of the projects I did were altarpieces. One was based on Xian iconography (with a twist; I might post those later if I haven't already and just forgotten), the second was a triptych of the 3 Eves.

 

I'll post 'em in 3 posts, with a little exposition on each.

 

The first one: the Lilith panel.

 

lilith.JPG

 

I mixed up a whole bunch of symbols into all 3 of these panels. Eve is herself a potent symbol to Western mythology, a much-maligned figure used to justify the abuse of women in multiple cultures. I personally think that the Eve mythos is a perversion of an old Goddess myth, so I wanted to create a religious work that presented Eve in a different light than we know her now.

 

So this first panel represents Lilith. According to Kabbalistic mythology, Lilith was Adam's first wife. God made Adam in the Garden of Eden, out of clean clay. Adam went around naming all the animals, then tried to mate with them, and when it didn't work out he complained to god that he was lonely. So god created Lilith out of mud and detritus. Adam and Lilith were initially happy, but when it came time to have sex, Adam wanted to be on top, and insisted that he was superior to Lilith because he was the man. Lilith said "I call no way!" and refused to lie under him, maintaining that she was Adam's equal, for god had made both of them from the earth - the same substance. Adam was stubborn, so Lilith invoked the magical Name of god, sprouted wings, and flew away to the wilderness, leaving Adam with nothing but his right hand for company.

 

Eventually, Lilith got it on with demons of the desert, giving birth to all kinds of monstrous children. When god sent 3 angels to bring Lilith back, she refused to go, so they laid a curse on her that 100 of her children would die daily. Lilith retaliated, I suppose, by becoming the demon of sleeping sickness - but she said that if a charm with the name of the angels sent to her was hung over an infant's bed, she would spare its life.

 

I have a hard time explaining what I was thinking when I painted the panels. All three sort of came out at once, with all kinds of wordless stuff behind them. I'm content to let people see what they like in them.

 

Panel 2: Eve as the Mother of All.

 

gaia.JPG

 

Regardless of the bad press the biblical Eve has gotten over the years, whether any Xian likes it or not, in the Xian mythos she is the Mother of All. Without Eve, there would be no humanity. I ended up more or less equating her with Gaia for this panel. I kind of had Neolithic Venus figures in mind too. Hence the flowers and voluptuous body.

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And the third panel: Mitochondrial Eve.

 

mitochondrial.JPG

 

I took a slight step away from mythology for this one and depicted our real Mother, our most recent common matrilinear ancestor. It is thought that she lived in Africa some 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. Her mtDNA resides in every human being on the planet today.

 

I had a lot of fun painting these. They're collages, really - with paint, stickers, found objects, variegated copper leaf (that has been oxidizing over time), feathers, real fig leaves, and so on. I used Bible pages as one of the foundation layers, with layers of tissue paper as a base layer to provide texture. The frames are decorative strip molding with leaves and vines stamped into them.

 

Take a peek, and enjoy (or hate, if you don't like 'em - as long as you react to them, I'm happy either way!).

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Awesome! Those are great gwenmead.

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Gwen

 

Absolutely wonderful artwork! Please tell me you are you going to share your wonderful gift with the world? Really, those should be hanging in an art show going to the highest bidder. If you do prints, making them affordable for the people who wouldn't be able to buy the originals (like me) PLEASE PM me and if I can swing it, I would buy them if affordable.

 

Thanks. :thanks: Yeah, I definitely am going to share them with the world, once I manage to get my shit together and figure out a good plan of action for doing so.

 

I have other work up at www.twodogslong.com. That's mah site.

 

:)

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  • 3 weeks later...

Wow that is some kick ass art work! if you were to make an affordable copy for poor people like me i would buy 1. keep up the good work. :grin:

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  • 1 month later...

Beautiful! These Eves remind me of the pictures of Egyptian goddesses that I saw in my Egyptian History class in college last year.

 

Has anyone ever read the book Herculena ( can't remember how to spell it)? These paintings also remind me a bit of the drawings in that book of strong goddesses and mortal women. I read it several years ago when Xena:Warrior Princess was popular ( the book was from the sixties so it was not an attempt at plagerism of the TV show). The author of the book said that the warrior princess Herculena was the original Hercules, but patriarchal Zeus and Ares worshipping sects in ancient Greece took the orginal woman as warrior concept and changed it to a male hero. As I had been quite young and immature then I was not sure if this was an attempt at feminists to twist history into something of their liking, but now since I've been studying history and anthropology in college I know now there's more to history than meets the eye.

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