The images I create for the Digitalnuts group are usually accomplished pretty quickly, as a
form of relaxation, but I must admit to having become slightly obsessed with this one, which, like the previous image, "The Magic of Mythology", was a response to a group challenge asking us build an image around one or more of the provided photos of a woman.

The idea for this one came to me while discussing with a friend the potential ramifications of the January 19th election in Massachusetts of Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate-- a line came to me from one of my favorite plays, in which a deluded and power-mad king who has murdered his way to the throne is given a prediction about his future, which he immediately misinterprets.

Rather than reading it as a genuine warning of what will happen, he sees only the apparent impossibility of the predicted event, and wrongly interprets the prediction to mean that he is invulnerable.

He proceeds on that assumption, and continues to slaughter friends, enemies, an assortment of women, children, and servants, and suffers increasingly from paranoia, hallucinations, and a seriously flawed belief in his own immortality before that which he believed impossible does, indeed, take place, and he meets a very fitting-- and very final-- end.

I thought it might be fun to create an illustration of an iconic image from the play-- one with which almost everyone is at least vaguely familiar (even those who've never seen it!)-- and although I chose to caption it with the less-familiar prediction rather than with the clichéd line virtually everyone knows, they both occur in the same scene.

My interpretation strays a bit from the standard presentation of the "secret black and midnight hags", but people have been taking liberties with Shakespeare for 400 years, and compared to some of the things I've seen done (including an Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of "The Comedy of Errors" so egregiously awful that, 10 minutes into it, my fiancé began referring to it as "The Tragedy of Terrors") my transgression here is pretty minor.

Once begun, the image took on a life of its own, and in the end involved 62 layers, parts and pieces of 18 different photos, head transplants, repositioning of assorted limbs, and a few other oddities perhaps best not mentioned... but nothing that "the weird sisters" themselves would not have done...


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The rights to this interpretation remain with the artist. Do not use without written permission.