The picture is called “My Galatea” after the myth of Pygmalion. I drew it at a time when I was working on the Snow Babies character of Valerie Clarke. She was my creation, made up of my daughter the Princess, a girl I had a crush on in 6th grade, and a very strange part of my own psyche that is essentially female. Sometimes things come together in such a fashion that the creation becomes more real than what I know as reality. Have you ever created something that was so perfect that you fell in love with it? It is a very strange feeling. It doesn’t create happiness. It makes you feel regret that what should be real is only fantasy. It makes you feel longing for something that you know you simply cannot have. It makes you feel creepy, like you’ve done something wrong. You have stolen bits of other people’s lives and put them together, made them live in a new form, the whole Frankenstein’s monster sort of thing. The evil abides in those things that you could never foresee as problems. The torches are lit, the pitchforks come out, and chaos ensues.
Falconet’s sculpture of Pygmalion (1763)
Catch a Falling Star 