The Graeae

This is the second year I’m participating in the La Calaca print exchange. As usual, I keep returning to my various obsessions as source material.

Last year I did an image of skeletons riding in a hot air balloon (I love hot air balloons, and also – especially – dirigibles). This year, I’m going to myths and legends for my inspiration.

The Graeae were three ancient female creatures, so old that it was impossible to imagine them ever having been children, and with a single shared eye among them. Their names were Deino (“dread”), Enyo (“horror”) and Pemphredo (“alarm”). Their sisters were the Gorgons, and legend has it that Perseus stole their eye from the Graeae and so forced them to tell how he might slay Medusa.

Medusa, the Gorgons, and the Graeae have long been favorites of mine. My sisters and I used to play a game called “Run, Medusa!” – not all of us willingly, since it pretty much just meant running away from my oldest sister and not playing with her. (You know how kids can be mean sometimes…) And in my mind, the three Graeae and the three Gorgons get conflated with the three witches in Macbeth, whose scenes my mother used to read aloud to us as bedtime stories. (Really, my family is not as Addams-family as this paragraph makes us sound.)

Plus, it’s fun to type the word “Graeae.”

Here is the moment of truth, starting to pull the print off the block.

OK! The first print.

Now there are 15 prints drying, ready to be sent to the exchange.

I’m also printing a second edition of these prints, which will be available at Roadworks later this month and Open Studios in October.