Athena, Greek Goddess of War and Wisdom

The art and myth of ancient history's badass battle babe

Athena is the Greek goddess of wisdom, warfare, and crafts. While Ares was more closely associated with the brutal and chaotic aspects of battle, Athena represented the strategic and disciplined side of warfare.

She was a protector of soldiers and military leaders, but her dominion extended far beyond the battlefield to encompass loftier qualities like intellect, mathematics, civilization, and civic planning.

She was the patron goddess of the ancient city of Athens, the center of Greek civilization and learning, and she’s associated with the invention of various tools and crafts, including weaving, the plow, shipbuilding, and the planting of olive trees.

Athena is also the goddess of wisdom. The original daddy’s girl, she was born fully grown and armored from the head of her father, Zeus. Her wisdom is not only practical and strategic but also embodies qualities like justice and fairness.

She is a symbol of learning, philosophy, and the arts. As the patroness of Athens, she was revered as a military strategist because she used her intelligence and keen insights to bring about a swift and usually victorious end to conflict.

The Art

One of the things that really sucks about creating art is the unpredictability of the outcome. Even when you’re using Photoshop and have all the time in the world to get it right, sometimes what you end up with is nothing like what you imagined.

That is unfortunately the case with Athena, one of my favorite goddesses of all time. I’ve drawn her several times, and the end result never quite does justice (haha, no pun intended) to the subject matter.

I often had the same problem when my favorite models would pose at the Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School sessions, where all my drawings were hatched between 2010 and 2020, until Covid shut them down for good.

On the nights when, say, Melody Mangler, Little Miss Risk, or Riannaconda was posing, I would find myself almost distracted by trying to capture them in all their glory—the costumes, the hair, their beautiful faces—that the drawings I ended up with were never quite perfect.

Enemy of the Good

Not that I really believe perfection is the ultimate goal of art (or do I? I am a Virgo, after all!). It’s just that the stakes are the highest when you really want to get something right, and those are exactly the times when your perfectionism can get in your way the most.

That’s one of the things about taking a looser approach to both art and writing that’s been interesting over the last couple of years. Comparing the pieces I did in Photoshop over the last decade to the drawings I did during Pinktober and Drawcember last year (you can find them all in the archives), the style is drastically different, for obvious reasons.

Some people have told me they actually prefer my sketchy, hand-drawn pieces, drawn in just an hour or two, to the more polished pieces I did in Photoshop, all of which took many days to create. And I don’t think that’s just personal preference.

I think the startling virtuosity of AI in creating polished artwork and writing over the last couple of years has changed what we appreciate aesthetically. We want to see the sketch lines, the hesitation, the imperfection, because it reminds us that a human hand created it.

I wonder if AI will eventually get just as good at rendering something that looks handmade as it is at creating perfection, and then we’ll really be doomed. (Now that I’ve said it, of course it will!) But being an artist and learning to use AI for brainstorming, inspiration, reference material and iteration is part of the journey too.

Art + Copy

In a similar vein, I used to spend several hours if not days writing each post on my old blog, mspink.com, which I’ve kept alive more for myself than for anyone else… I couldn’t modernize it because it was created with seriously ancient technology (note how it’s barely readable on mobile devices), but I couldn’t just let it die either.

These days, I write almost every post on Saturday morning, which is both liberating and terrifying. Sometimes I rewrite old posts, of course, and the goddess posts are expanded from my Badass Goddesses book, but I kind of enjoy figuring out what to say on the fly. Keeping it conversational, and real.

I dread the day when I will have published all the goddesses in my book, and mined all my archives for the best stories to refresh, when I’ll have to start from an actual blank slate every week… but we’ll cross that bridge together when we come to it.

Thanks for reading, everyone!