Die Drei Verwandlungen
painted by Alexandra Haban-Spanos, 2/23/02
gouache (personally created from dry pigments), ink, oil paint, 33cm x 49.5cm (13" x 19.5")
Gift for a friend

The following was written by Mathew David Lund;

This painting is inspired by the first of Zarathustra’s speeches: On the Three Metamorphoses. The speech describes the three stages of development through which the creative spirit must pass in order to produce truly new things. Nietzsche is primarily interested in the creation of new values, but the allegory is also nicely read as pertaining to artistic creativity.

The three stages are the camel, the lion, and the child. Initially the camel appears; glorying in its strength, it longs to be heavily burdened and to take the weight of tradition on its back. It is patient and reverent, and a bit ascetic, eschewing triumph, spiritual comfort, friendship, and pleasing illusion, until it has acquired all it can carry and it plods out into the desert.

Once there, in the empty solitude, there is no call for the over-burdened and straining spirit, and the camel turns into the lion. The lion seeks to master his dreary realm, and destroys all that which is not his. The lion even seeks to root out and kill all those elements of himself of which he was once so proud and which he even called sacred. The most formidable of his former masters, and therefore the last to be put to the sword, is the great dragon "Thou shalt". In his former reverence, the lion loved "Thou shalt" and thought it was sacredness itself, but now his spirit rages "I will", and he knows that not only must the old values perish, but he must be their murderer. And so now he wanders alone through a field of corpses and nothing more will grow, since the lion is no creator.

For this reason the lion now gives place to the child, to the only one capable of creating new values: "The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, and self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred "Yes". For the came of creation, my brothers, a sacred "Yes" is needed"