Cassandra was a figure in Greek Mythology. According to a random site on the Internet I found (look at that mighty fine referencing) - she was a princess of Troy.
She was astonishingly beautiful. She could see the future. She was cursed, however, as all good things generally are, into the fact that no one would believe her. This led to the destruction of Troy.
There's several representational options here. A woman with a burning, crumbling city behind her, still pleading to be believed... or the story of how she came to be the fortune teller.
I chose to represent Cassandra due to the fact (and this will be familiar to regular readers of the blog) the most recent Florence and the Machine album, Dance Fever has an excellent song called Cassandra. Thankfully the song is actually linked to the story of Cassandra, with some embellishment rolled in for drama.
I used to see the future and now I see nothing
They cut out my eyes and sent me home packing
Followed by some unrelated lyrics... which comes back to the title of the song and the subject matter...
Crying like Cassandra, I
Used to tell the future,
but they cut out my tongue
Followed by more beautiful lyrics before we get back to the myth of Cassandra her self, struggling with the stuff about not being believed that her prophecies were actually the impending future.
As empires tumble and cathedrals flatten in my heart?
This makes me want to use this underlying motif as a representational theme in the artwork - an "astonishingly beautiful" woman with a haunted expression on her face while the ruins of a city burns and crumbles behind her.
This means that there will be quite a lot of detail going on in the background which is not something that I have attempted to do with Stable Diffusion in the past. This will be an interesting learning experience, and I hope to share more as I go along the journey of creating this work.
Here's an initial prompt output - and it will probably govern how much time it will take for me to complete this image.
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