Click on this link to go to a slideshow of the stages of painting this image: The Lady and the Chimera

The Lady and the Chimera, 12″ x 9″, 30.5x23cm, oil on canvas, 2010.

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I am really wanting to move onto something else, so am going to consider this little painting done. I have painted it with a very small palette knife, really a dental instrument, and a sable brush with about 5 hairs. The paint is very thick – and I held it over the scanner for this image which I’ll replace in 6 months when it’s dry with a better one. The painting has taken far longer than I could have imagined.

The chimera is half human and half lion, yes, but originally meant to
be a cuddly stuffed animal chimera. His expression is a little more
lusty though, isn’t it. And that hat!

I
painted the canvas black first as an
underlying nod to the void, emptiness, what all form arises out of.
Rather than painting from a white canvas I thought to begin from
Śūnyatā, from a blackness. To allow imaginal form to manifest from
there…

And I got a lusty little chimera! And a floating figure, a woman in outlines, who you can make of what you will…

Oh, I hope it makes you smile as I do! The painting is whimsical, fairy-tale, yes, a little bit mythic, and my first attempt at Surreal, also from the imagination, no life models.

I think of this as a jazz composition, a riff in paint.