Leda and her swans Painting

I hope viewers are moved by the scale, power, and sensuality of the central figure. I was first drawn to Rubens’ image of Leda and the Swan as a young man, fascinated by its sensuality, the brilliance of form, composition and the power of the union depicted in the piece. Based on the Greek myth whereby Zeus transforms himself into a swan in order to have sex with Leda, it depicts a rape and the appropriation of the divine feminine by the base masculine, and questions notions of sexual engagement, boundaries, power in union and the relationship between ourselves and the divine. The story has been referenced by visual and literary sources including, Yeats, Lou Reed, Plath, Da Vinci, Correggio, Boucher, Michelangelo, Cy Twombly. My reworking of Rubens' original painting (1601 and 1602) began almost by accident, when morphing and stretching familiar images digitally, to modify the composition and relationships within the figures. As I pulled and pushed the digital drawing it opened a new relationship between the woman and the swan, somehow it seemed less violent, more reverential, even consensual. It was this image that I wanted to explore in paint. As a painter, I feel reverent of paint, its plasticity and facility to create a mood and transfer emotion. I find myself transfixed by line, mark making, glazing, and the ideas and structures in a piece. Despite the proclamation that ‘painting is dead’ in the digital age, I am still captivated by the uniqueness of every brush stroke and the subtleties of texture and the depth paint can provide. I am fascinated by Ruben’s painting techniques in a contemporary setting, especially as a vehicle to revisit Jung’s edict that ‘a myth is not something that never happened. A myth is something that happens every day’. This painting is a proto-feminist piece, bringing some balance to the original Leda story. In this piece, the figure of Leda has morphed and now controls the space. Zeus is no longer raping her nor orchestrating the action – the god has been reduced to a small phallic triple-protrusion, evoking the holy trinity. Leda, on the other hand, is vast, organic, umbilical, and a sensual being in her own right. There are now three versions of Leda in this image, spiralling left, right, and vertically, spilling across the picture in which the woman is dominant.

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:60 W x 40 H x 1.5 D in

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