Athena

Athena was known to be the Goddess of wisdom,courage,justice,you could say she was jack of all trades.she is depicted as a shrewd companion of heroes.She was more of a strategist and a diplomat,often Athena was called upon to mediate wars among the gods.She condemned violence unless necessary.Apart from Athens she extended her hand to Argos,Sparta.When Zeus swallowed her fearing his life,Athena leaped from Zeus head.
When i read about her I was inspired by her courage and wit,it gave me hope and strength to create my own identity.
Through the metal armour and cloth i wanted to show that her being a warrior should not rob her off her feminine side.She embraces her warrior persona and at the same time doesn't try to hide or is ashamed of her body. according to the mythology Athena took up a bird's or an owl's form which is the inspiration behind her attire.The sharp jawline and straight posture depicts control and strength.Athena is shown holding a sphere in the hand draped with cloth to show her trying to dissolve a war create peace rather that jumping in it head on.The serpent crawling up the sphere is her adoptive son Erichthonius in actuality,but i have assumed it to be her companion who she trusts and gives her strength and assurance to always have her back

Genesis of an image

Nigel Spivey struggles with the question of how images came to be,to unravel this mystery he goes on a quest to trace the very beginnings of paintings. So hold on to your hats through this mind-boggling journey.

             it all came to light when a young girl stumbled upon an oxen painting in the cave of Altamira with her father,a local archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola. Paintings so charming that they made Picasso think 'we have learnt nothing'. What drove man to create such pictures?was is a form of language? a way of documenting events maybe,if so how did he arise at the concept of an image? But the idea of documenting his life is a contradiction to the cave painting since it focuses only on animals.Which leads to next theory constructed by Henri Breuil which states that the paintings were created to help man hunt. unfortunately this theory failed when the recovered bones of animals were not of those illustrated on walls.On the roof of the small damp cave in which Nigel hardly manages to fit through,you can see red spots and symbols,or just black lines,spots on the body of an oxen.Were they trying to communicate through symbols?what do the spots represent?we recognize things since we have seen them before and it gets engraved in our minds. but how did man draw if he never came across a two dimensional image.Nigel sets an example before us,a Turkish man who in his life time had just seen the said animal but never an actual painting of it was asked to recognize the animal in the painting and to my surprise he couldn't identify it.I still can't digest the fact that he was unable to recognize the horse,who in my defense looked quite realistic!

            running out of plausible conjectures Mr Spivey moves to south Africa where he finds similar paintings as those back in Europe of animals and hunting scenes done by San people. David Lewis Williams took a keen interest in cave paintings.His initial idea suggests that they were scenes from their daily life,but after meticulous observation he found the picture very uncanny.He noticed the man having hooves for feet and hair on both the man and the eland.When you know more about the artist's life it gives better insight of his paintings and it dissolves some of our if not all 'whys' and 'hows'. Bleek having done that got a better understanding of San peoples body of work.He reveals the importance of trance within their culture which Nigel later experiences.It struck David suddenly,its a ritual scene depicted in the painting.He presumes the eland is dying by its crossed legs and so is the man with hooves. When the healer goes into 'trance' that is the half conscious state,images such as the dots are bombarded in his brain since they are wired into our brains from the very beginning.To put this scientific explanation to test Nigel makes a trip to a psychiatric facility.When his eyes are exposed to brilliant led lights he starts seeing similar patterns which were painted in Altamira caves.Our brains are wired the same way,they haven't changed a bit.when the San people go in trance they hallucinate the eland who is considered that of grace,for the cave man hallucinations were caused because of sensory deprivation in the dark cave.They wanted to mark these images since they didn't see it anywhere else but in their brain

                     When man thought that images had died out there was another surprise waiting for him.Man didn't abandon paintings instead he cut out megaliths and carved animals on it with the aid of flint tools alone.To feed these thousands of workers in a deserted place led to the concept of agriculture.It was because they believed in this culture of images and the addiction to nail them down pushed them to achieve such great beauty.Images never died and now we can't imagine a world without pictures.