Medusa Portrait – Artwork

Oil paint on canvas. 40 × 40 cm, 2026.

Not a monster, but a bearer of force, memory, and consequence.

Medusa marks a point of origin in Lotte’s ongoing portrait series of female archetypes, heroines, and figures whose power has been distorted, punished, or written out of view. In this painting, Medusa is not treated as a monster, but as a bearer of force, memory, and consequence. She appears as an archetypal misunderstood heroine: feared not because she is evil, but because she cannot be controlled.

“Medusa symbolizes the first woman who could no longer be turned into an ornament.”

For Maison Douce, this work holds a special place because it opens a path that continues through other pieces: the portrait as invocation, as correction, as a site where female power returns to the center of the image. Not as decoration, not as victim, but as presence. In that sense, Medusa is both artwork and threshold — one of the first clear entrances into a body of work that is still unfolding today.