I don’t think I’d surprise anyone who’s followed my art career if I told them that I’m a huge fan of Art Nouveau. After all, I list Mucha as my 2nd favorite artist of all-time.
I love the way Mucha painted women. He emphasized their femininity, which as a man coming from San Francisco, I didn’t see enough of. In SF, they encourage both genders to be somewhat in the middle so the boys are weak and the girls are confused and nobody is happy. Yet, nobody can figure out why they’re not happy. (Insert eye roll emoji here).
Mucha isn’t the only Art Nouveau artist I loved. I loved the stereotypical Art Nouveau Selene painting – the Goddess sitting on the moon.
Quick background. Selene is the Ancient Greek Goddess of the Moon. She’s the daughter of the Titans Hyperion and Theia. She’s also sisters with Helios, God of the Sun, and Eos, Goddess of the Dawn.
If you don’t know that much about Greek Mythology, just letting you know, you’ll find a lot of inconsistencies. So as the artist, I get to choose which one I follow. I have Hecate as her BFF because to me, it makes more sense.
For her lovers, I like using Endymion the best because he fits. He’s the regular shepherd boy that just happens to be extremely good looking. Selene sees him and instantly falls in love with him, then bears at least 50 beautiful daughters with him.
She also got seduced by Pan and of course, has a daughter with Zeus (Zeus bangs all the babes so no surprise). Different areas of Greece had her with other lovers as well. I tend to focus only on Endymion though as it fits my artistic narrative the best.
I’m assuming you already know that the Romans stole their Gods and Goddesses from the Greeks. So her Roman counterpart? Luna.
When I paint Goddesses, I always use the Greek names since the Ancient Greeks are whom we got our culture from. We just as importantly got our beauty standards from them as well.
If you want to be good looking, look like a Greek statue. Applies to both genders.
All 3 models
If you’re new to this blog, I mainly use three models – Allie, Roxy, and Sophia Jade. Allie is a beautiful blonde and one of my besties irl. Roxy is a beautiful brunette and also one of my besties irl. They’re both private figures so I’ll never put one of their full names.
Sophia though is a public figure. You can see a lot of work she’s done in the past.
I met her when I wanted to have four models. One retired though so I’m now down to three. Which is fine. I may or may not look for a fourth model this year.
In most Ancient Greek depictions, Selene had horns. I don’t like the aesthetics of a woman with horns (unless I’m painting a succubus) so I follow more the Art Nouveau tradition.
I haven’t painted a Selene in awhile but here’s an idea of some of them. I’ve had all three of my models model for these paintings and had to change both Roxy’s and Sophia’s hair color because they both have black hair, which won’t show up against a black background very well.
Diana
If you have a blog, do you ever write articles and never finish them, then find them a year later?
Well, here’s one example.
Since I wrote this article, I’ve picked up another model. Diana is a model we met in Romania.
When I first saw her, I told her she’s got beautiful feet and someday, I’ll paint her as Selene. We had a real good modeling session in Bucharest where I drew her with the trusty old pencil and notepad. Those sketches turned into paintings.
This is my first of hopefully many of Diana as Selene.
Above I experimented with some different colors for the sky. More fantasy and less realism.
I like how it turned out. Now, we’ll see how much I can get for this painting…