Compelling Faces in Art - Paul Delvaux - Pygmalion (partial).

Pygmalion was a Cypriot sculptor who abhorred all women for their lasciviousness, but fell in love with an ivory female statue that he carved. He pleaded to Aphrodite to animate his Galatea, and was not refused his happiness.

Here, Delvaux revisits the legend and broadens the context in which one can think of Pygmalion’s story. It is the woman who creates the statue of a man and falls for it. The context can be broadened further: disregarding any restrictions or conventions implied by gender. 

The reinterpretation of any myth is based on mutability of the past, through a continuous equilibrium between history and contemporaneity. 

So how does this translate to me (or you)?

Voltaire said, “Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.” And isn’t it fun to look at a subject from various points of view, anyway?

I like what K.J. Bishop said in The Etched City: “I am always a different man; a reinterpretation of the man I was yesterday, and the day before, and all the days I have lived. The past is gone, was always gone; it does not exist, except in memory, and what is memory but thought, a copy of perception, no less but no more replete with truth than any passing whim, fancy, or other agitation of the mind. And if it is actions, words, thoughts that define an individual, those definitions alter like the weather - if continuity and pattern are often discernible, so are chaos and sudden change.”