Mother Chaos – colored pencil • personal work • PRINT AVAILABLE HERE
The Greater Demon Fairig as she is depicted in her capacity as the creator-god, Mother Chaos, who brought the wild energy of the void into the world and triggered the first explosion of proto-life. Although she is nominally considered a benevolent deity, Fairig’s maternal instincts are somewhat inscrutable; she brings destruction more often than creation, preferring merely to provide the basic materials and let others deal with fashioning them into order. Though often given a womanly likeness by human artists, Fairig’s true form—as is the case with her true name—remain a mystery. She is also known to appear as a three-eyed, blue lioness, with a yellow mane and wings made of rips in the fabric of reality.
A personal piece I’ve been plodding away at since May. Fairig is an old character of mine who appears a little different each time I draw her. For this piece I was inspired by both religious iconography and trading card illustrations: it represents Fairig as a god-figure, bringing about (if not directly overseeing) the creation of the world. There is a barren planet beneath her, and a newly-formed moon low in the sky. Behind her is a starscape based on this picture of the horse head nebula. It wasn’t until after I colored it in that I realized it matched her own colors, causing her to blend into the background a little bit. Upon reflection I decided this was exactly what I wanted, since Fairig is not just her physical manifestation, but all the forces and raw materials of chaos—here amply represented by a cluster of young stars in a giant cloud of gas. For this reason I’ve drawn her mane and tail blending into the nebula, connecting the two. It suggests that Fairig’s true form is something closer to that of a nebula: so huge and powerful as to be viewable only at a great distance, the fantastic animal in the foreground merely a physical approximation; an avatar of her personality.
The fact that this avatar is a lion-taur with four arms (two of which are wings) and seven eyes (one in the palm of each hand) and scythe-like horns tells you really all that need be known about said personality.
Fairig has yet to appear in any of my published stories, but her son, Tobius, is the eponymous hero of two comic books.
Media: Colored pencils with white ink on 12”x9” illustration paper. Prints here!
Goldeen Ogawa is a writer, illustrator and cartoonist. To keep tabs on what she is doing you can follow her on twitter @GrimbyTweets, and on Tumblr. You can also contact her directly.