Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Prey.

Introducing Christine Granville, the first exploration into a theme that’s been on my mind these days: Predator and Prey.

She broke my heart. She lived large, both fierce and ferocious. The base injustice of her demise when an average, run-of-the-mill stalker took her incredibly proactive life still stings from the moment I first read about her sometime in February this year. Christine did her fair share of stalking, to be fair, but it was usually in the interest of the greater good of humanity, and at great risk to her own safety.

Born Krystyna Skarbek to Polish aristocracy, she lost her father early on and the family experienced economic difficulties. To make a very long, breathtaking saga quite short, she was recruited by by British secret service in 1939 with a noted assessment that described her as “absolutely fearless”. That is where she was given the name Christine Granville. Her relatively short life and career spanned Hungary, Poland, Ethiopia, Turkey, Algeria, Britain, Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt -at a minimum. Christine conveyed microfilm that documented oil transportation, Nazi plans to invade Russia, and military installations. She skiied through the Hungarian Tatra Mountains into Poland in order to convince her mother to leave off teaching children in order to flee the Nazis: Christine failed, as her mother was just as stubborn as she. Countess Skarbek died in a Polish prison in Warsaw. Christina continued her anti-Nazi efforts, bluffing her way out of several situations using both threats and theatrics – biting her own tongue to bleed as if she had tuberculosis, or rescuing agents out of prison by bluster and falsehoods. She burned through husbands like kindling. She was so very, extremely, extreme.

Post WW2 Christina worked as a stewardess on cruise ships. On June 15, 1952, she was stabbed to death by a common stalker in the London hotel where she stayed in between her cruise line assignments.

Primates have eyes located on the front of their skulls, as do all predatory vertebrates. Animals that are strictly prey usually have their eye sockets located to the sides of their skulls, for better periphery vision. Some birds, such as owls, not only have enormous eyes in front, but the ability to swivel their heads on their necks up to nearly 270 degrees in either direction. Humans are predators, and not just for subsistence- sometimes for entertainment. You might be a predator when you are hunting down the very last bunch of withered spinach in the vegetable aisle at the supermarket; you might also be a predator when you are falling down your rabbit warren of the documented demise of an unethical government narrated on your social media accounts, that needs fact checking at every notable moment. It’s a good thing to have your predatory powers honed – it’s a good thing to be wonderful at what you do, at what you are able to find. But we are also prey. Humans take on both roles. Women, children, and men – all of us, but some more so than others, will find at some point in life that we are also prey, and that role surprises and disturbs us.

I am in a career shift currently. I recognize that I will have to adjust my medium to something easier to handle and transport, hence the pastels. Also, I got them as a gift from my aunt, who has a great sense of timing. I hope to make more of these in the future…fleshing out this exploration of human nature and praying that the weather proofing paper holds up well with the medium. I suspect there might be more women than men, but we shall see. I’ve lined up a couple more fantastic personalities that should be recognized for their flamboyant roles as both predator and prey. Let’s see where this takes us all in the future.

Here is where you can start your own hunt into Christine Granville, and there are many other resources as well, once you start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krystyna_Skarbek

https://a.co/d/a6ze5Rt -this leads to a book on Amazon addressing 20 female warriors by David Yuzuk

The historical photo that I took my inspiration from is in Apic/Getty Images.

I tried to give it a 1940’s feel, stylistically. I might stick with that for future subjects in this theme.