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Artist’s Statement  -  Kevin Convery

  Joseph Campbell, in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces, ” wrote that “Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.”     Since childhood, when first exposed to the rich imagery of these stories, I have been inclined to agree.  Over time their characters and symbols seemed to find a resonance with my own experience of life.  This then became the source material of a visual poetry worked out over many years.     I do not, in a strict sense, ‘illustrate’ myths but draw heavily on their undercurrents to create reflections on basic life themes: desire and destiny, love, loss, death and regeneration.  I think these stories have held such long enduring interest for people because they reflect the transitions through which we all must pass in some way.

     Almost all of these pictures have evolved out of a blend of traditional lore (usually from the Greeks, Celts and Nordic peoples) and more personal impressions.  The last bronze rays of sunset filtering through a forest might transform it, just for a moment, into a sacred grove of Arcady or the enchanted land of Tir na Nog.  A woman, brooding alone at a picnic table, would call up some sorrowful figure such as Echo or Cassandra.  Like overlays of some fine, transparent substance these little moments of vision seem to fuse myth and memory into a fragment of the “fabric of dream” which underlies everyday human experience.

Ariadne

“And so we may turn to him, as did Ariadne. The flax for the linen of his thread he has gathered from the fields of the human imagination… Furthermore we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination we shall find a god.”
Joseph Campbell “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”

The Swiss psychologist, Karl Jung, once said that the most difficult thing a person had to do in life was to confront and integrate the ’shadow’, or dark, negative side of the personality.
The ancient Greek story of Theseus and the Minotaur speaks metaphorically of this process. Briefly told; Pasiphae, queen of Crete, after insulting the goddess Aphrodite, is cursed with an inhuman passion for a bull from which she bears a genetic freak, half man, half bull. In shame, her husband, King Minos, has a network of intricate passageways built in which to hide his ‘monster-son.’ Every nine years the subject state of Athens is forced to send fourteen youths, male and female, to be sent into the maze to be devoured by the Minotaur (Minos’ Bull). One year the son of King Aegeus of Athens offers to go with them. Although the venture is considered completely suicidal, the young warrior, Theseus, is aided by the Cretan king’s daughter, Ariadne. She give him a ball of golden thread with which to find his way back once the monster has been met and overcome.
Ariadne can be understood to represent in symbolic form that aspect of the feminine that contains seemingly contradictory natures, the passivity of the deer and the fierceness of the wolf. She threfore becomes a mediator between pairs of opposites, the ‘guide into the labyrinth’ that enables the hero-soul to face the dark secret and return to daylight