mythic art – Rob Medley

I painted this at the Ashville Viking Festival in Ashville, Ohio this past weekend. It’s a charming festival held in late April every year. Entrance is by donating canned goods. It’s all for a good cause.

In Succession, the castle does not merely crumble, it yields. Its walls, once raised by human hands against sea, storm, hunger, and invasion, have become a pedestal for something older than heraldry. The red dragon rises where banners would have flown, its wings catching the blue violence of the sky, its body arched in possession, judgment, and inheritance.

A vibrant red dragon head with sharp teeth and fierce expression against a blue sky backdrop.

The coast recedes into mist and cold water. The towers remain, though diminished, their silhouettes dark against the luminous sea. Civilization lingers here in broken masonry, carved crosses, hollow windows, and weathered walls, yet the painting belongs to the creature above them. The dragon is neither intruder nor ornament. It feels like the inevitable heir, the answer waiting inside the ruin long before the first stone was set.

This piece is about the fragile arrogance of permanence. Kingdoms build upward. Time answers from above.

The painting is sold.

A note about pieces I paint at festivals. If someone buys it off the easel, I give them the option of being a one of one, e.g. no prints will be made, or letting others buy prints. In this case, there will be no prints.

A red dragon with blue wings stands on the ruins of a coastal stone castle overlooking a blue sea and storm-lit mountains. — Succession, 20 x 24 inches, acrylic on canvas, sold.

Sometimes I paint things and forget to post them. This was completed in 2025.

A woman of the sea stands between revelation and concealment, her presence half offered, half withdrawn, as though the tide itself had shaped her from memory and foam. In Selkie’s Secret, I wanted the old northern folklore to remain intact, the sense that the sea keeps its own counsel, and that what emerges from it is never fully ours to name. The selkie belongs to that ancient border where longing, danger, beauty, and loss all wear the same face.

The Viking ship in the distance gives the scene its second heartbeat. It suggests pursuit, witness, or perhaps only passage, humanity moving across waters that were ancient before oar or sail ever touched them. Against that hard timber and mortal purpose stands the softer mystery of the seal-woman, bound to the shore, to the surf, and to the secret life beneath appearances. The image became, for me, less about narrative in the ordinary sense and more about the ache of legend itself, the feeling that some truths arrive only in glimpses, then recede.

Color carried much of the work. I wanted the blues to feel living and luminous, a sea that was beautiful without becoming tame. The misted forms and curling atmosphere at the left edge were meant to suggest that the world of myth is never entirely absent, it only waits for the right light, the right loneliness, the right silence. The painting leans into that threshold, where folklore is neither illustration nor ornament, but presence.

Selkie’s Secret is an offering to maritime myth, to northern stories, and to the old conviction that the sea remembers more than we do. 20×24″ acrylic on canvas.