Grendel's Mother

This is a follow up to a painting I did last year of Beowulf tearing off Grendel's arm. I recently decided to carry on with the next part; Beowulf facing Grendel's mother.

My idea behind Grendel and his mother is that they represented the last in a lineage of an old, isolated shamanistic clan that still worshipped the Northern European pagan deities. Their continued survival and propagation (and monstrous appearance) has since depended on a combination of inbreeding and black magic. It makes for good motivation for me as the interpreter of these characters but I don't think I could instill all that in one painting. So I've dropped hints such as the burning alter which depicts the Venus of Willendorf and Grendel's body lying on a mound of the skeletal remains of his stillborn siblings.