Tarot Maiden forcefully conjoined with beast

La Fuerza oil on canvas 200 x 70 cm 2020

 The idea behind ‘La Fuerza’ - the Force- has been with me for a long time, every now and then for some years I’ve sketched a version of essentially the same figure. It’s a big Tarot card, of course. I’ve always been bothered by the awkwardness of most solutions to the delicate lady overpowering the fierce lion, the problem and uncertainty of conveying her strength in an ambivalent contradiction of expectations coupled with an achievable practicality. So my own synthesis was just that, the old-as-humanity and unabashedly modern and fantastical synthesis again of animal and.. woman!

That would be my claim at originality in this new merging of figures save that there’s an old Egyptian goddess (not Bas) who also has a MALE lion head and the fact that I value originality very poorly in what regards art, as I’m sure any adverse critics of mine, if existent, would gleefully point out. 
So the image was just simpler arranged like that, or it appeared so in my mind’s eye, so to say, and that is the handiest excuse actually, if one is needed to justify a painting of whatever I feel like painting. Seems I just want to write nonsense and keep on at it, right. 
So the figure is a woman, I wanted her stocky, a bit anyhow, more that my usual, and completely integrated to the face of the lion, hope I accomplished that. The body had to follow the gaze, the mental motion, it really didn’t have to look like a mask, to be able to raise ideas about what is really happening with this joining of primal virility and female fortitude, which I conceive as clearly defined and evident here. So it may be a case of producing a monstrum, of admonishing or toying with the effect of incongruent juxtaposition.. may as well be, an artist looses control of where the image is taking him, in the best of cases. Here for example the background was supposed to be that of a barren desert, just some shrubs and bushes here and there, maybe a savannah. Talk about original, right? The tower appeared from a memory of unforgettable Modena, now that I think of it, there was a famous late medieval monster from that same place, if I don’t misremember, also a composite figure of sorts. Have to look it up