Leonora Carrington’s long career as a painter has celebrated the mystery and mythology of animals both real and imaginary.
Leonora Carrington’s totem animal, and the animal most commonly seen in her work, is a white horse. Carrington is an example of a female artist who identified strongly with animals, and used them constantly in her work throughout her career. Creatures both real and imaginary populate her canvases in great numbers.
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They fill the air with fire,
They soar above the tallest tower,
They glisten with emerald-scaled attire
They inspire awe and terror whenever they glower…Dragons!!
Dragons are more than just creatures of myth; they are beings of legend. They are even considered gods in some cultures. Dragons of ancient times garner fear and respect but dragons of modern times entertain and inspire the imagination. In China it was consider as a fortune creature, while in Europe it was an evil transformations.
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The seemingly now-separate categories of person and animal have never been stable, but medieval people lived in a shifty world of monsters, manifestations and muscaliets.
A law-breaking dog ‘confesses without torture’ and is hanged to deter other dogs from crime, a glacier is warned to desist its landslip activity and when it doesn’t is anathemized by the bishop, and a werewolf is arraigned but only in its human form.
Medieval people were commonly magical thinkers or, if you prefer, they lived within unstable cultural signs. They slipped easily between mental categories. For them a rose was not necessarily a rose even when its rose-ness seemed unarguable. Looking like a rose, smelling like a rose and behaving like a rose wasn’t enough. Roses did not merely stand in for other things, such as ‘love’ or ‘England’,—but could become other things.
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