Collage

She tore a strip off her lover

Scratch beneath the surface of a bohemian artist and you still find a chauvinist making immoderate demands of his muse

She is always on his mind

Zeus gives birth to Athena by from his noggin, but despite the splitting migraines, lacerations of grey matter and the stitches required, the old rapist still couldn’t fully usurp female reproductive creativity. A crippled artisan like Hephaestus as the midwife, says it all really.

Pear-shaped, she is the apple of his eye

He only secured a third eye of all-seeing wisdom, by making a captive of his daughter and appropriating her orbs

Immured, she heard unseen voices outside her impermeable walls. Her gaoler heard them only inside his brittle head

The one-eyed Jack was out-trumped and eclipsed by a humble ace of hearts

The pentimento beneath the self-portrait revealed him as Nature had intended and hatched, but which the hoyden had re-sculpted with chisel and hammer into a being more likely to progress through society. Though in truth she had merely swapped one set of prejudicial responses for another

She swirled vaporously in the lava lamp of his heartsick mind