End of a Fantasy

Digital Painting

2024

In many stories, Dragons were creatures of extraordinary life, knowledge, and gluttony. They were a reflection of humanity’s great desire for power and transcendence beyond the concerns of powerless mortality.

European dragons toe the line between almost divine creatures and arbiters of evil and destruction. They symbolized an older world view based on forces of nature and its inevitable cycles of peace and destruction. Dragons were physical deities that demanded sacrifice of treasure, food, women, whatever a person or community held dear. In some stories, dragons even kept female “favorites”. Many European myths speak of Christian knights slaying dragons to end an era of tyranny with the help of holy favor.

In the East, Dragons are seen as similarly divine creatures with the benefit of being generally revered as wise or magical creatures. They are mysterious and operate on their own plane, only coming down to interact with the Earth after a great offering or sacrifice. Monstrous dragons in eastern myths tended to lack the wise traits, behaving more like predators after not only the body, but the soul.

And yet there are a handful of stories of dragons choosing the companionship of a single person. There are even stories of dragon-born kings and great warriors. These stories speak of a return to mortality despite one’s divinity; offering oneself to devotion on earth wherever that may be, holy or sinful. Dragons were an exercise in morality without the constraints of human futility.

I am someone who was born long after these stories held any weight beyond parables and myths, but I like to think about how people used to see the world. If little girls lay awake at night afraid that a dragon would one day spirit them away, or unearthing a massive fossil renewed faith that such leviathan creatures could still be among them.

Behind The Scenes:

This painting is intended to be a subversion of the knight in shining armor trope. Indeed, this scene has ended with the violent death of the dragon, but the maiden is unharmed. Overcoming fear and taking advantage of its favor, she uses the dragon’s nature to attract it to its demise, whereupon she can escape into the blinding world outside.

Power imbalance of all kinds can result in abuse of the opportunity (regardless of gender or ability) and it can be a near insurmountable task to challenge, much less eliminate, the source of the problem. Whether by coercion, complacency, or necessity, these situations can become impossible to escape for quite some time.