Gosh, I just spent the last 10. minutes trying to remember when the original roots of this piece was created. And I can’t remember, and I would have to pull out my external hard drive to go through my older image files and that’s just too much effort. Anyway, sometime in 2018, maybe, I was invited to participate in a round robin book art collaboration with 12 other artists with each book having its own theme. One of the books, I painted two bird women figures in watercolor and I always wanted to revisit them.
So when I finally got this in between time to work on other things other than my norm, I decided to finally revisit the owl woman. I’m not sure where the idea of the owl woman came from. But she’s been with me for quite a while. In fact the very first painting that I ever hung up on a wall outside of my home for possible sale was of a owl with the face of a woman. I remember when I went to visit the gallery wall in Port Townsend, WA and saw the red dot, I almost fainted.
Fast forward ten years or so and I painted another owl woman in that collaborative book. And now fast forward 8 years this encaustic mixed media owl woman came to be. I had printed a scan of the owl woman painting onto rice paper and then embedded onto an encaustic painting I had started. And I kept working on it a bit here and there.
I actually finished this a while ago. For so long I have been wanting to make paintings based on mythological beings, of creatures in the in between. Hopefully the next one I make will be sooner than another 8 years!
I just quickly looked up “myths of owl woman” and some interesting ones popped up. One in particular resonated with me- la lechuza….hmmm. I’m going to have to delve into her more. From what I quickly read she is a symbol of retribution, of justice served. Interesting…..