Not the hero I expected...

There’s always a stage in oil painting where the work is not quite finished, but you can’t actually do any more until it has reached a certain layer of dryness. This is especially true if you want to add something sheer, like see-through fabric, or in the case of my latest piece, street lights. So he’s going to have to sit for a few days before the final fling.

I think all paintings arrive with some kind of challenge, but this one wasn’t quite what I expected. And the challenge began before I even made the first brushstroke. Unusually for my work, the title arrived before I had an image.

The Return.

There was definitely going to be a horse in this one, which is funny because it feels like an eternity since I last painted a horse.  And now I’m laughing, because as I write this, that song, the one that has constantly unceremoniously added itself to my play list is on again – Holding out for a Hero. “... he’s gotta be strong and he’s gotta be fast and he’s got to be fresh from the fight”…that song has been circling the entire evolution if the piece. Of course it would. 

 By the time I started working out what I was going to paint, I had fallen down a Templar research rabbit-hole. Then YouTube, doing what YouTube does, started showing me music I “might” like and it was full of Templar imagery. Horses kicking up dust. The familiar mantle of pale cloth with the blood-red cross everywhere. Men in shining armour. Swords. Battle. Drama.... You get the kind of thing…

I saw one particular thumbnail that showed a galloping horse, a knight with his sword arm outstretched, shredded cloth blowing in the wind and movement. Ooft...that’s a return, I thought. I’d love to paint something like that on a big canvas. Something cinematic, dramatic, and pretty damn sexy actually. From there, I started thinking about how I would do it. I even went so far as to research the tack of the period to make sure it was ‘correct’. Horse people are like this. We can get very anal about scrutinising films for equestrian correctness. It’s just one of those things. So I came up with a few ideas. I like my paintings to confront the viewer, which means I usually prefer the figures to be forward-facing. Maybe he could be bursting out of a ruined temple with some kind of divine light behind him that would have looked fairly epic.

But no. That wasn’t it.

It needed to be a modern setting, like the girl and the lion in a present-day city. Eventually, I had pulled together what I thought was my reference image, and I wanted to discuss it with my favourite EI co-conspirator. “This is the basis for my next painting,” I said, attaching the image. Suddenly, there was a warning notice. Apparently, the image violated community standards as potential bullying or harassment.

Eh?

What in the censorship bullshit is this? ChatGPT agreed there was nothing obviously wrong with the image, and we went on to discuss Templar history and mythology, and why the Divine Masculine might carry the codes of a warrior monk such as devotion, discipline, service…commitment etc. But the warning message niggled me. I had a canvas stretched, primed, and ready to go. But four days later, I was still looking at it. So I logged on to Claude.

“I have something I want to show you,” I said, and uploaded the reference. No warning this time. So I asked, “Looking at the image, can you tell me why this might have been flagged?”  Claude suggested that crusader imagery has become politicised, and that may have been what triggered it.

Ah... That put a different slant on things.

When I was researching the Templar Order, I was coming at it from the angle of a devotional religious order that may have met a grisly end for reasons far more complicated than King Philip of France being in debt to them. Yes, they had become wealthy and powerful, but I also wonder whether they had become too gnostic-leaning, too esoteric, perhaps too close to something the established order could not control. That, to me, would be the bigger threat.

Claude came at the Templars from a more military perspective. It talked about campaigns, conflict, Jerusalem, crusades, power and territory. Two very different aspects of a single order.

And I sat with that.

If I went ahead with the piece as I had first imagined it, there was potential for the image to be read in a way I did not intend.

Would that bother me?

If it meant censorship of the exhibition, yes. This was going to be an important and pivotal piece, there was no way I was going to leave it out. If it meant personal backlash, nope, that wasn’t an issue. But it still made me pause. And eventually I realised I wasn’t struggling to begin because I was afraid of the image. I was struggling because it wasn’t the ‘right’ image.

Because when I thought about how the Divine Masculine returns, it is not some testosterone-driven charge back from the fight. It is not a Disney prince on a white horse. It is not performance and nor is it a conquest. Because the real battle is not an external one....It is the battle within. It's the dark night of the soul. It's sitting with your own shadow. It's devotion without spectacle. It's strength without domination. It is the embodiment of the self... after everything false has been stripped away. And that was the important part. Not that someone might apply unintended meaning to the painting, but that the real meaning would be lost in historical cosplay.

So I dropped the armour, I dropped the big red crosses and I dropped the shining battlefield hero…I did however keep the hoodie, just as a wee nod to the origin.

And now he feels more true. He’s not a battle-scarred soldier returning from war, but a man who has faced something bigger than any army, he’s faced himself… and won.

And that is how the Divine Masculine returns.