Legends Envisioned: Mythical Character Illustrations

In addition to painting, I have written a substantial amount of poetry and researching for new poems has led me to stories and characters that I inexplicably feel the need to illustrate. Any story or character that inspires me or resonates with me, I just have to illustrate them somehow.

When the subject of my art projects does not relate to global warming or climate action in some way, the intention is to raise awareness of a story that I believe deserves a wider audience. And I try to go beyond the gods and heroes of ancient Greek mythology, since over five thousand cultures exist in this world with their own tales to tell. Most often, I try to find stories outside of European cultures, especially American Indigenous, South Asian, and Subsaharan African cultures and try to illustrate the gods and heroes of the lore of said cultures.

The legends that I've envisioned in these mythical character illustrations are generally my own interpretation of their original stories, but I try to do at least some justice to the cultures in question.

Yennenga, Dagomba Princess, Invincible Warrior, Founding Mother of the Mossi Kingdom

This painting depicts Yennenga, a legendary 12th century Dagomba princess whose son founded the Mossi kingdom of Burkina Faso.

Yennenga, a born horsewoman and invincible warrior, sound that she simply had to flee her father's kingdom when he repeatedly denied her wish to marry; she was only an adolescent, but she led her own battalion and often her father's army. King Ndega did not want to lose his best warrior to marriage.

Disguised as a man when she escaped her father's palace, Yennenga fled on her stallion. In her flight, she met, by coincidence, another royal refugee, Riale, who had chosen exile over execution of his own brother for the assassination of their father, the king of the Mandé.

The romance that blossomed between them resulted in marriage and children, including their son Ouedraogo, whose name means "stallion", in deference to his mother's daring escape. Ouedraogo would go on to establish the Mossi kingdom in what is now Burkina Faso.

While Yennenga was famously beautiful, her remarkable daring and tenacity are far more interesting to me. I don't know whether she ever bore the title of Queen, but she definitely earned that title.

Sac Nicté of Mayapán, the Mayan answer to Helen of Troy

The Maya of Central America have their own version of Helen of Troy in Princess Sak-Nikté of Mayapán.

Already betrothed to Prince Ulil of Uxmal, Sak-Nikté had fallen in love with the young King Kanek of Chichen Itzá, who had just taken the throne. Told by an old seer to take what was rightfully his, Kanek did just that when he attended the couple's wedding and eloped with the bride.

Returning to Chichen Itzá with Sak-Nické, Kanek ordered his people to abandon the city with him, leaving it an empty shell when Ulil and his troops arrived to retrieve his bride.

Here Sak-Nikté gazes at the brewing trouble, perhaps unsure if she has made the right choice.

Loowit, human form of Mt. St. Helens

The archetype of a strikingly beautiful woman who is blamed, rightly or wrongly, for a disastrous conflict is remarkably universal. The Klickitat Νation in the United States Pacific Northwest recognize Mount Saint Helens as just such a figure in their stories.

Dedicated to tending the communal fire between the Multnomah and Klickitat Nations, the elderly Loowit found the Chieftain of the Gods, Tyhee Saghale, reward her devotion with eternal youth and beauty.

But two of His sons, both chieftains, Wy'East of the Multnomah and Pahtoe of the Klickitat, were just as aware of Loowit's transformation as the rest of their people. Both brothers vied for the hand of this enchantingly fair maiden who kept the fire, but Loowit found that she could not choose between them.

Wy'East and Pahtoe, already fierce rivals, lost any brotherly love that they might have had and began a war that burned whole forests and burned and buried whole villages.

The Bridge of the Gods, a natural bridge over the Columbia RIver Gorge, which would stand only as long as peace endured among both nations, crumbled and collapsed into the river, taking Loowit and her fire with it.

Fed up, Tyhee Saghale struck down his sons and turned the three lovers into mountains. Wy'East is now known as Mt. Hood and stands haughty and tall while Pahtoe, tenderhearted despite his own temper, is now Mt. Adams, his head bowed in sorrow over the loss of the fair Loowit.

Tyhee Saghale kept his promise to Loowit even in her mountain form and turned into a youthfully beautiful, symmetrical cone that is now known as Mt. St. Helens.

With the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, Loowit could perhaps have been venting her own frustration over the whole debacle. Geologically speaking, she is only a teenager compared to the rest of the Cascade Mountains.

Deirdre of the Sorrows meets her true love, Naoise, one of three warrior brothers

Due to my fascination with my Gaelic roots in Ireland and Scotland, I have naturally learned of the Gaelic answer to Helen of Troy, Deirdre of the Sorrows. She has the second sight, a form of extrasensory perception, which means that she can also be compared to Cassandra.

The daughter of the court poet of King Conchobhar of Ulster, the court druid Cathbad foretold her terrible destiny: she would grow up to be the fairest in Ireland, kings and lords would wage a terrible war over her, Ulster's three finest warriors would be forced into exile and die for her sake, and Ulster would collapse.

Despite the protest of his army to kill the baby and totally avert the prophecy, Conchobhar commanded that she would be raised secluded from men and marry him as soon as she was of age. Despite his self-serving effort to avert the prophecy, it came to pass.

Deirdre, disgusted with the aging, irritable Conchobhar, wanted none other than a handsome, fearless young warrior of raven hair, snow-white skin, and blood-red cheeks whom she saw in a vision. Naoise Mac Uisnigh, Conchobhar's finest warrior and hunter, matched this description. He and his two brothers were, together, the finest warriors of all Ireland.

With so much sadness in the story and most depictions of the couple are related to their tragic end, I decided to depict them in their happier days, before disaster struck.

Aengus, Irish god of love, youth, beauty, and poetry with his harp and songbirds

As a romantic who has studied Scottish Gaelic, it has been natural for me to invoke Aengus, the Irish god of love, youth, beauty, and poetry.

Aengus, the son of the Dagda (the Irish answer to Zeus) and the river goddess Boann, is a beautiful young man who employs songbirds to carry messages of love between lovers. While a fierce warrior in his own right, Aengus is also a fierce advocate for couples.

When trying to find the identity of a young woman, Caer Ibormaith, whom he saw in a vision and vowed to marry, he had to identify her on Samhain (November 1st) in the form of a swan among 150 other swan-maidens if he wanted her hand in marriage. He chose correctly and, both transformed into swans, they flew away together, singing so sweetly that all who heard their song would sleep for three days.

Many times in poetry, I have invoked Aengus, hoping that I would get help from him.

Banshees Wail for Life as We Know It

While studying Scottish Gaelic, inevitably I have learned about irish and Scottish folklore, and that folklore includes the bean-sídhe (banshee), a harbinger of doom.

Bean-sídhe literally means "woman of the fairy folk" and she is a guardian spirit to the ancient Gaelic families. Heard more often than seen (she usually appears as a woman in a silver-grey cloak, hence their veils and cloaks here), she visits the family home in the evening and wails and laments through the night to warn the family that one of them will soon die. You hear her crying three nights in a row, you know that you should begin planning a funeral.

The bean-sídhe is often viewed with dread, given her association with death, but she herself means no harm; she is only trying to warn your family of impending death as well as safely guide the soul of the dying to the world of the spirits, and since she is a guardian spirit and this is "her" family she is genuinely grieving.

The bean-sídhe has her human counterpart in the keening-woman, who has historically been hired to keen (wail and sing lamentations for the dead) at funerals. The wealthier the family of the deceased, the likelier that there would be many keening-women. These women were effectively in charge of guiding the community through the grieving process and often took girls as students to learn the lamentations and the art of crying while singing. Many of the laments are indeed beautiful, sad songs, but the purpose of keening is not so much to sound pretty as to provide emotional release.

When many mná-sídhe (plural of bean-sídhe, hence "fairy-women") are heard wailing at once, it's a warning that somebody important (politically, religiously, etc) will soon die. And many times, I have used the bean-sídhe in poetry to warn about something that affects all of us: climate change and its related existential threat to us.

Gay romance at sunset, selkie and human find each other

The selkie of Northwestern European folklore, mainly the Gaelic-speaking lands and Iceland, is an interesting variation of the merpeople that I just had to add to my art projects.

Selkies are seals in the waves, but on land they have the ability to shed their cloaks and take human form. Often, there are tales of (often tragic) romance between a sealwoman and a human man, often because she is torn between her love for him and her love for her home, sea.

In Gaelic stories, specific terms for selkies are rarely used and are rarely differentiated from mermaids. They are most commonly referred to as maighdeann-mhara in Scottish Gaelic, maighdean mhara in Irish, and moidyn varrey in Manx ('maiden of the sea' i.e. "mermaid") and clearly have the seal-like attributes of selkies. The only term that specifically refers to a selkie but which is only rarely encountered is maighdeann-ròin, or 'seal maiden'.

I can relate to selkies because, as a gay male, I can relate to feeling like I'm caught between two worlds, feeling like I don't exactly belong. Hans Christian Andersen apparently wrote The Little Mermaid as an allegory for his own experiences as a gay man in a society that shuns LGBTQIA+ people; like the mermaid ("Ariel", as we would call her now), he wants to be accepted as human and to live happily ever after with the man he loves. Given that he lived from 1805 to 1875, Andersen did not really get either, and a friend of his, Edvard Collin, even spurned him when he wrote a letter to him confessing that he loved him.

Since I have seen gender inversions of the romance, with a seal-man and a human woman in love, I wanted to show a romance between a seal-man and a human man. Why not a gay selkie romance at sunset? The natural world boasts many beautiful settings, and I very much had this atmosphere in mind.

This scene is reminiscent of Sandro Botticelli's work, and even brings to mind Perseus rescuing Andromeda.

Gay romance by the sea, selkie and human find each other

CúChulainn and Ferdiad, the Gaelic Achilles and Patroclus, enjoy a moment together

Ever since I learned that CúChulainn, the Gaelic equivalent of Achilles combined with The Hulk multiplied by 1000, and his friend, Ferdiad (whose skin could not be pierced by any weapon), could possibly been sweethearts. What evidence that we have of warriors of the time show homoerotic scenes that could easily have been a means of building team solidarity or just genuine warmth between brothers-in-arms.

In any case, these two young men loved each other and, tragically, were forced in the "Táin Bó Cuaillgne (Cattle Raid of Cooley)" were forced to fight each other to the death on opposite sides of the war.

As the stories describe him, CúChulainn was very distinct; his blue eyes each had 7 pupils; his hands and feet each had 7 digits; he had claws instead of nails; his cheeks each had four dimples colored red, yellow, green, and blue; his hair was grew in three different colors, brown closest to the hairline, "blood-red" in the middle, and golden yellow at the crown, and each section was put into seven braids. And this says nothing of how in his battle frenzy, he could possibly terrify The Hulk.

This aside, he was so beautiful that the men of Ulster feared that he would ruin their daughters and steal their wives; he would only accept Lady Eimhear as his wife.

I wanted to be as accurate as possible with their appearance according to the stories while keeping in mind that they were both handsome.

And, just as much, I wanted to show these two fierce warriors in a moment of tenderness with each other. To show that warriors are human, are more than just martial figures.

King Gilgamash reunited with his beloved Enkidu in Irkalla

I have been tempted to try and depict Gilgamesh and Enkidu for some time, and certainly to see them reunited.

The goddess Aruru created Enkidu, half-man and half-bull, as a response to the complains of the people of Uruk about the cruelty of their king, Gilgamesh. Originally a "wild man", Enkidu gradually acclimates to civilization, and eventually he and Gilgamesh meet when Enkidu disrupts Gilgamesh in an attempt to seduce a newlywed and Gilgamesh, irate at the interference, fights Enkidu.

But they are equally matched in strength and, exhausted from the fight, they end up respecting each other's strength and soon befriend each other. Gilgamesh becomes a more just ruler because of Enkidu's presence in his life. Enkidu and Gilgamesh are effectively joined at the hip henceforth and end up slaying the monster Humbaba as well as the Bull of Heaven, prompting anger from the gods (especially from Ishtar), who punish the duo and Enkidu dies.

Gilgamesh grieves for Enkidu and, now afraid of death, goes on a quest to achieve immortality. It ultimately fails and he accepts that he will die, go to Irkalla (the Underworld), and be reunited with his family... and Enkidu. Here, Gilgamesh is reunited with his beloved companion, Enkidu, at the entrance of Irkalla. The sadness of the tale made me want to depict them reunited in death.

I chose to depict them as reunited lovers. Whether Gilgamesh and Enkidu were lovers or friends remains open to debate, but the affection that these two men have for each other is what really captures me. That Gilgamesh mourns Enkidu like a lover and is so shaken by his death that he goes on a mission to gain immortality is quite a statement about how much they loved each other.

Ultimately, when depicting legendary characters, I seek to depict the women as an active agent and the men as the eye candy rather than the inverse. Why not depict women famous for their beauty as assertive and confident? Why not depict legendary heroes as