Contest Entry No. 03

Contest Entry #3
Artist: Oak
Title: Muse
Medium: # Watercolour, maker and watercolour pencils on Cans
Artist's Comments:

I started from "Start". I had no idea where the muse might take me.

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This isn't what I was planning when I started. I was starting from the three muses (the precursors to the later nine), the movement of water, the sound of striking the air and the human voice.

So movement, sound and words.

The connotation of "Muse" differs greatly from author to author from what I've found so far... the muse is either an obsession, a driving force, inspiration itself, or the source of all stories.

You could call upon a Muse to give your tale the feeling of having a divine author as well as a mundane one.

Homer, in Book I of The Odyssey:
"Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy." (Robert Fagles translation, 1996)

Dante Alighieri, in Canto II of The Inferno:
O Muses, O high genius, aid me now!
O memory that engraved the things I saw,
Here shall your worth be manifest to all!
(Anthony Esolen translation, 2002)

William Shakespeare, Act 1, Prologue of Henry V:
Chorus: O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

This all really twisted me about.
I struggled with poetry, with prose, with the idea that the muses are all three things which are invisible (comics makes them swooshes, sound effects and speech bubbles respectively)... I realized how out of artistic shape I am.

I'm not sure if this submission even counts because of how it abstracts the myth into the concept, but after I made it it felt like it must have needed to get out. It looks nothing like what I was intending. It looks very little like what I've done in a long time.