At Home with the Gods

Names like Zeus and Hercules ring bells immediately in most of our minds. Shiva and Arjuna are possibly somewhat familiar. Jupiter and Mars are just planets, right? And you might never have heard of Haumea and Lonomakua had I not just mentioned them. All these names are the names of Gods, steeped in a mythos that is quite possibly different from your own. How many cultures are there to choose from anyway?

I don't think there is an answer to that. Ancient cultures around the world have come and gone and some have come again. New cultures are popping up all the time, take for instance the Raelians (Clones) who don't have a set of Gods to define their beliefs, but rather aliens. There are subcultures which don’t have Gods to drive them but just a common bond in music and eclectic taste. The focus of this article however, while not excluding the godless cultures and subcultures of the world, is on those cultures that do give us gods and fables and mythological beings which have stories attributed to them to teach us a lesson about ourselves.

The prime example is, of course, Greek mythology. Oh, how I would love to see the temples to Zeus and the titan Hyperion spring up in a small podunk town just to add yet another realm of diversity into the American culture, but alas too many cartoons have come out to allow the sect of Hades to taken seriously. In Greek mythology we are presented with stories that have been done and redone faithfully through the ages, on canvas, with pencil, in ink. The themes of the Dryad and Narcissus have surely been explored somewhat in the digital realm but not a great deal.

The digital artist generally is an abstractionist, eager to use whatever cool tools they have at hand and with a whim and a couple of faded images feel proud to produce a half-hearted piece called "Dryad in the Moonlight" or "Nymph in a Crystal Pond". Faithful reproductions of the old tales with the modern tools have ceased to be because the mind of the artist sees these things as overdone. And the commonplace doesn't often hold much interest to the artistic mind.

But there is something lost in time because of this. The digital artist because of these wimpy efforts of little lasting value is not taken as seriously as the painter who toils over the canvas with the paint in the old fashioned manner. The digital artist needs to buck up and begin a digital renaissance of sorts and bring back the old tales and ideas in a new form. Mary Cassett's Summertime and Edgar Degas's Dance School need, I stress need, to be replicated in a modern environment. With tools like Poser and Bryce available to the general public and movies such as Monster's Inc. and Final Fantasy: Spirits being made, it is all too possible to build a still frame replication of these masterpieces and hang them side by side.

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