the future is rooted in the past!

The Art of Duncan Meredyth has appeared in magazines, calendars, comic books, and on the front covers of books, fanzines, and role playing publications. Working freelance and part-time since 1986, his main topics are Norse mythology, heroic fantasy and historical recreations. A lot of this work you can find on Meredyth’s site on deviantART. Other fields of work include crafting and replicating items from the Migration Period and early Medieval times. Browse these using the deviantART and German Site headers or using the social media icons.

Modern society provokes a necessary, continuing discourse about traditional role models and social identity structures. In times distinguished by rapid change more than by anything else, many people long for the unchanging – the immortal – the myth. Yet mythology, though essentially timeless, has to be rediscovered and redesigned to fit changing times. Thus, essential images of themes and role models reappear throughout history in different guises, re-imagined as the new generation sees fit.

As a professional Psychologist and Counselor I find the concept of archetypes formulated by the early Psychoanalyst C. G. Jung utterly interesting and intriguing.

In my art I focus on the re-interpretation of archetypes – mainly from the Arthurian legends and Norse mythology – and try to depict a more emotionally flavoured view on traditional male role models than modern culture tends to present. While most 20th Century and post-modern stories tend to show rather shallow or even cliché arrangements of a male hero – with the emotionally broken or burned out being one of the current favourites – mythological archetypes show a wider range of emotionally balanced and inclusive male traits, often presented in a mythological journey through stories and Pantheons as a transition of ascending stages of maturity and humanitas. You find characterizations merging the warrior and the husband, the ruler and the wise man, the jester and the helpful friend.

I see art as a starting point for the discussion of controversial themes and topics, as in my drawing of Tyr and Fenrir, the god sacrificing his right hand to help bind the wolf that will eventually take part in the destruction of the world, and that he himself raised as a cub. The image has helped start a number of discussions on my deviantART online profile page where it was presented in 2012, the story itself being one of responsibility and setting things right that you yourself helped come about, at great personal cost – the enormous environmental changes we face today can be seen as the modern equivalents of the primordial wolf.

Be welcome, stranger, to roam the pages of myth and imagination!