Fox maidens, Owls and other social outcasts

I admit I'm fascinated with myth. Every time I paint I create a myth about what the story is behind the image. How can you not create a history for your artwork. This means that over my life I look for reasons that perhaps are not within the realm of probability but at times something more supernatural. This doesn't mean that I wholeheartedly grasp every fabulous story. I'm a skeptic about ghosts, fairies, elementals that haunt gardens and the Loch Ness Monsters. Having said that I also keep an open mind - who am I to say that things don't exist or aren't really here. Maybe there are fairies and I'm not lucky enough to have the perception of seeing them. I really wish I could.

In my life I have seen a few things that rationally I cannot explain. Mysterious things that now, after many years past the experience, I have made it into a legend or improvised a rational image to the improbable story. That super- rationale experience has caused me to gather as much information as I can in order to find out the myth or the truth of what I saw and dealt with. In keeping with this is the whole concept of synchronicity that tries to explain the phenomenon of unexplained connected items popping up. I get interested in some aspect and suddenly I find references springing up everywhere. Take for instance the recent interest in fox- maidens. So I start playing this game over the summer that has a sub race of women who are fox maidens. A friend sends me a card I receive in the mail of a fox dressed in a kimono. I get a recommendation to read a series of books by Christopher Golden in which one of the supporting characters is name Kitsune, the Japanese name for the fox-maiden in the mythology of Japan. I go through my hodgepodge of a library to find some information on coyotes and next to it is a book I bought and forgot on foxes.

All this leads me to start working on art that has to do with foxes and fox-maidens because they are such an odd point of Japanese myth. Here are animals that are able to become human in appearance, marry and bear children with humans, only to be treated as an embarrassment to the humans involved. In fact if a man marries a fox-maiden, he's treated with respect but his wife not so much. If she dies or goes back to being a fox, his village and townspeople just act like he never was married or his wife just didn't exist. Poor fox.

So this whole idea has started me on a mission to develop artwork based on fox-maidens and my own slowly developing mindset on them. I think they are much maligned. After all they are a cousin to Coyote, nothing less than an important trickster in north american myth. I really feel like perhaps, fox maidens want to fall in love with a human so that they can be loved and thereby get a soul.

Morning sky

Sometimes I get lucky with my beat up old digital and find a picture I really like. I've been exploring my neighborhood looking for shots of things I take for granted. One morning I remembered to bring the camera and while I was standing and waiting for the bus, I got a shot of clouds.

I did something I didn't think I'd do and that is I removed an entry because of someone's remarks. I' m not upset about the remarks, just the fact that the person missed the whole point of my note. I'll repost it after I tinker with it a bit.