Odin Painting

This painting has an interesting process: I had a model for short poses two nights; I wanted fairly high abstraction, but clearly recognizable elements. My process was for this very intuitive, not much planning. Since I normally paint happy paintings, I was a bit horrified with two black birds. I also had incredibly strange difficulties painted his eyes. I kept commenting that to the model. Why is it impossible to paint the eyes. When driving home that night, I was very upset about the state of the painting. Why would I paint something like this. Is there something wrong with my life. Then it suddenly hit me that this is Odin from the Nordic mythology! It was strange; why Norse Mythology and why not my Kalevala background? It also became clear why I could not paint the eyes: In order to get eternal wisdom, Odin had to give up his eye sight. This is why he had two black raven birds that flew around the world and reported him what the people were doing. It all made sense now. Next night I told all this to my model. He said that he knew it from the start since he was in a process of reading about the Odin! He said he was especially fascinated that I could not paint the eyes! This really illustrates the special connection between a model and a painter. I have not shown this painting anywhere, but decided now to offer it here. Since then Odin has come to other paintings almost like I am asked to paint this topic. This is original one-of-a-kind painted created by human mind and hand without any digital tools.