Sensitive Cyclops

If you’re doodling a monster there is one quick way to ensure the viewer knows it’s a genuine out-of-the-subconscious monstrous creation and not just a badly drawn crocodile. Give your creature only one eye. Much of the animal life on earth tends towards symmetry in the arrangement of sense organs. A one-eyed life form seems to contradict some fundamental principle, causing unease. The viewer knows this beast is built to a completely different design than the rest of us. An entirely different form of life that sees the world in a wholly different manner. It is an alien. It is a monster.


Ray Harryhausen’s Cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, 1958.

All the one-eyed creatures of today are probably descended from the Cyclops, one of the cast of the ancient Greek myths. It is a lumbering giant that is outwitted by Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. This image of the Cyclops as brutal, dumb and fond of violence has been its stereotype ever since. The Cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad could not even speak, it just lurched about and roared. I can think of only one exception to this sort of Cyclops in art, this painting by Odilon Redon.


The Cyclops. Oil on cardboard mounted on panel, 64 × 51 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum, Holland. Painted sometime between 1898 and 1900.

What kind of Cyclops is this? Peeking shyly at a sleeping figure in what feels like a misty Garden of Eden. One does not feel the sleeping figure is in any danger. This Cyclops just wants a friend. A constant problem for those attempting to depict the Cyclops is what to do with its nose? The artist sometimes plants the eye in the middle of the forehead, retaining a normal human nose with two weird patches of skin either side. Or they forcefully squash the nose down, like in the movie version above. Redon avoids the problem by simply withholding the nose. He makes his Cyclops a smooth faced creature, not some warped aberration. This helps make it seem childlike, innocent as a lamb. Painting the creature without a nose sidesteps blunt questions of anatomy. Such questions would ruin the soft magic of the image. This Cyclops is made seem even more harmless by the absence of its right shoulder. Where does the far shoulder go? It is just about feasible that it is curved out of view. It matters little, the effect is to make this Cyclops seem dainty and meek. This is Odilon Redon's vision of the Cyclops, at home in a dreamscape.