Day 7 - The Queen Fights Her Future Husband

I've read a lot of weird-ass fairy tales in the past week, but I've also found shining treasures buried deep inside the earth.  My absolute favorite by miles is "How Geirald the Coward Was Punished," which I will now summarize, because the Wikipedia summary sucks raw eggs through a straw.

Rosald, our hero, is the eldest son born to a poor knight.  As a teenager, Rosald meets Geirald, who is the same age, but who has the better fortune of being born into wealth.  Geirald longs to travel the world, but he needs a traveling companion, so he says that he will pay Rosald's way if Rosald will give all credit and glory for any accomplishments to Geirald.  Rosald agrees, and his parents give their blessing.

Along their travels, they first encounter a band of 12 robbers who refer to each other with color names - Blue, Red, Green.  Reservoir Dogs, anyone?  Geirald wants to flee, but Rosald comes up with a plan to go to higher ground and roll rocks down onto the robbers' heads.  The robbers are defeated, and Rosald gives the credit to Geirald, along with a ring from one of the robber's hands.  Geirald wears the ring everywhere they go, much to the admiration of everyone who sees it.

As the fame of this accomplishment spreads - two men defeating twelve dastardly robbers! - Geirald and Rosald appeal to a nearby king to stay the winter in his keep.  The king agrees, provided that they slay a pesky giant in his kingdom who has killed 50 knights.  After commissioning a special weapon for the purpose, Rosald single-handedly kills the giant, cutting off its head as proof.  Keeping his promise, he gives the head to Geirald to present to the king.

Word of these heroics spreads to the unmarried queen of a neighboring kingdom, whose subjects keep insisting that she take a husband.  She comes to a feast at the king's keep and asks if Geirald will fight one of her pages to demonstrate his skills.  The king approves, but Geirald becomes convinced that the "page" is going to be a valorous knight who will kill him.  As Geirald makes preparations to flee in the night, Rosald convinces him to stay by saying that Rosald will switch clothes with Geirald, fight the page, and give Geirald all the glory.  Geirald agrees.

When the time for the battle arrives- and this is the part that makes me want to jump up and down as if the whole world were my trampoline - it is not a page who appears to battle Rosald-in-Geirald's clothing, but neither is it a knight.  It is the Queen herself, disguised as her page.  The battle is mighty, but Rosald eventually prevails, and afterwards, he slips away to give his clothes back to Geirald. Pressed for time, however, he forgets to give Geirald back the ring stolen from the robbers.

Geirald appears before the king to receive his accolades in the torn and soiled clothes of battle, and as his prize, he asks for the hand of the Queen in marriage.  The Queen, who has just slipped back into the stands, thinks that while the clothes are the same, the man looks slightly different from the one she just fought.  When she also notices that he is not wearing the ring, she withholds her consent, asking that Rosald and Geirald fight each other.  Rosald throws the fight, but the Queen sees through that and asks for one last challenge, in which Rosald and Geirald both fight two knights of the queen's choosing.

Rosald cannot save Geirald from this final test, nor indeed can Geirald save himself.  Instead of appearing on the field at the appointed time, he hides under his bed.  The Queen calls off the fight and marries Rosald, impressed not only by his courage and his skill in battle, but also by his willingness to keep his promise, even at the cost of her love.

HOW GREAT IS THAT?!

Here is The Queen, Battling Her Future Husband.

This is, as always, available in my shop.

Day 6 - Silently Sweeping

When I selected my fairy tale theme for this challenge, I ordered lots of books from the library, including Grimms' Bad Girls & Bold Boys: The Moral & Social Vision of the Tales, by Ruth Bottigheimer.  I pounced on that one as soon as it arrived, and in the chapter on Cinderella, I learned something both fascinating and sad.  There were three editions of the Grimms' fairy tales, the first put out in 1812, the second in 1819, and the third in 1857.  Over that time period, Cinderella's lines of "direct speech" were repeatedly reduced.  As Bottigheimer says, "Cinderella explains, conjectures, conjures, questions, assumes, and lies in her fourteen speaking appearances in the 1812 edition. . . . The 1857 version presents a far different picture" of a Cinderella without much of a voice.  This, of course, is the Cinderella most of us know.

I thought a lot about how to create a visual representation of silence and silencing.  I could have sewn her lips together, put a piece of cloth over her mouth, or given her no lips at all.  In the end, I decided not to mutilate Cinderella, but to illustrate the silence through empty space.  The lines left to her are lines of dirt between the floorboards, which she is charged with sweeping away.  The expression on her face tells us (I hope) how she feels about this.

This is available in my shop.

Day 5 - Bluebeard and His Last Wife

I have always been morbidly fascinated by Bluebeard because of all the bloody bits, but I don't think anyone wants to hang a painting of bloody bits, so I went for a futuristic hipster wedding portrait thing, because fun.

That is all.

Day 4 - The Heroine Preparing to Save Herself

So here's something I didn't know: In the Aarne–Thompson system of classifying folktales, there is a type called "The heroine rescues herself and her sisters."  Get the hell out, right?  I WOULD NOT JOKE ABOUT IT.  It's a type of tale (type 311, in fact), although of course, it's not a type that anyone ever bothered to relate to me when I was a child, because I was raised under a leaky bridge by sexist trolls.

I'm kidding.  It was more of a leaky overpass.

Okay, in any case, I stumbled across "How the Devil Married Three Sisters"while reading up on "Bluebeard."  Both tales feature an evil husband, a forbidden room, and a multiplicity of curious brides.  Where Bluebeard has a room full of bloody corpses, however, the Devil has the doorway to hell.  In his house.  To each his sulfurous own.

Both tales also feature a telltale sign that the wife has been overly curious.  In "Bluebeard," the wife, shocked at the sight of her husband's former wives hanging from hooks on the walls, drops the key to the room in the blood on the floor, after which, the key will not come clean.  In "How the Devil Married Three Sisters," the oldest and middle sisters are still wearing their wedding corsages when they open the door.  The flowers wilt in the heat of Hell - as flowers will - and then the Devil, realizing what they have done, casts them down into the fiery pit. Bummer.

It's hard getting married to a guy when you suspect he's murdered both of your older sisters, but that's what our heroine does, because the devil has money, and her parents like the match.  (Sigh.)  After the wedding, our clever heroine receives the same prohibition about opening the door, and she experiences the same need to open it anyway.  But.  Before opening the door to Hell, she removes her corsage and places it in water.  As she stares into Hell itself, she sees her sisters languishing there, pulls them back out again, and after some celebrating (I presume), she goes back to the Devil with her corsage still "fresh."  Seeing that she has obeyed him, the Devil becomes utterly smitten.

Now, call me crazy, but when you go to your new husband, and he is overcome with love and lust upon seeing that your "flowers" are "still fresh," I see a giant virginity thing happening.  The two older sisters might have been untouched by man on the night of their wedding, but their curiosity - their need to know more than their husband permitted - was tantamount to sexual unchastity. SO INTERESTING, yes?  Yes, indeed.

ANYWAY, from this tale, I chose the moment when the third sister goes back to the devil with her "fresh flowers" and looks into his eyes, innocently, as if nothing has happened.  It's a critical performance, because she can't very well say, "Hey, you cast my sisters into hell, but I just pulled them out again, and tomorrow, I'm going to trick you into taking us all back home, so fuck you very much."  She has to get through this night so that she can save the day tomorrow.

Here she is, looking up at the Devil, plotting her escape.

Day 3 - Snow White, Her Heart Pounding

This canvas began with a mistake.  To create one of the "frames" on my Day 2 canvas, I mixed up a pile of a dark and dirty olive green - or rather, I tried to achieve a dark olive green, but ended up with something much closer to brown.  En route to the olive color I could see so clearly in my mind, I added more green, and then more, followed by still more, until suddenly, my pile of paint was bigger than my fist.  Oops.  Rather than waste it, I decided to coat this canvas, but it looked so dark that I temporarily slipped into a funk.  (This happens sometimes when you're painting 30 Paintings in 30 Days: You're tired, and small pebbles can seem like Sisyphean boulders.)  Once I decided to make a dark and threatening forest, however, the canvas came immediately into focus.  Phew.

Here is Snow White, Her Heart Pounding:

In person, it's almost magical, and I fear I can't capture that in pictures.  

Day 2 - Sorrow

Yesterday, I told you the early part of the story about Biancabella.  Today, I must relate the rest.  When she came of age, Biancabella was betrothed to a prince.  Now, this prince's stepmother (need I specify that she is wicked?) had intended for the prince to marry one of her daughters (need I specify that they are ugly?).  The stepmother waited until the prince was called away to war, then ordered her servants to take Biancabella away and return with proof of having killed her.  The servants, in an act of "mercy" (?), removed Biancabella's eyes and hands.  Biancabella lived this way for many years until she grew so sad and desperate that she thought of taking her own life.  At this point, her magical snake sister-mother-father reappeared, gave her back her eyes and hands, and took her back to the castle.  The stepmother was thrown into a fiery furnace, and Biancabella lived happily ever after with a therapist on call 24 hours a day.  Okay, I added the part about the therapist.  But seriously.  Would she not need some intense therapy?!

I called yesterday's canvas, "Biancabella, Flowers Growing Out of Her Hands."  Today, I present "Biancabella, Her Eyes Stolen," which I then renamed "Sorrow."

I am so interested in the way that we frame acts of incredible violence and horror in fairy tales that I decided to literalize that with multiple "frames" around Biancabella.  She is our point of focus, but we feel distant from her because we cannot meet her eyes or know her mind.

It is available in my shop.

Day 1 - Biancabella

Last year, when I completed this challenge, I had a theme, and I'll be honest: I found that damn helpful.  As I joked to someone yesterday, without a theme, it's hard to have a brilliant idea every day in a row for 30 days!  This year, my theme is "Women in Fairy Tales and Myths," because I love to paint women, and I love the bizarre, bloody, murderous, awful, surreal, and terrifying tales that different cultures pass down through the generations.  Humanity knows how to keep it real.

To kick things off, I chose an Italian fairy tale called "Biancabella and the Snake," because it is freaky interesting.

• Biancabella's father takes a wife because he is growing very concerned that he has no heirs. His wife, however, does not conceive a child by him.  Instead, she conceives when a tiny female garden snake slithers up her dress and into her womb during a casual outdoor nap.  It's a phallic symbol.  It's a female.  It's FASCINATING. 
• Biancabella is born with the snake wrapped around her throat three times.
• Later, the snake calls Biancabella to the garden, identifies itself as her sister, and asks her to bathe in milk and rosewater, after which, flowers grow from Biancabella's hands.  To me, this is a sort of secular baptism, followed by something like stigmata.  MORE FASCINATING.

I will probably stick with this fairy tale for at least one more painting, but until then, this is Biancabella in the garden after her milk bath, sprouting flowers from her hands.  I took only one work in progress shot.

It is available in my shop.