December Days 29 - A Thing I Have Noticed

[It's December Days time! There's no overarching theme this year, so if you have ideas of things to write about, I'm more than happy to hear them.]

An observation, and perhaps a request for help.

For as much time as I have spent in places with art and statuary of fairies, dragons, and other mystic creatures, I have yet to find an artist in stock who doesn't depict their dragons in one of two ways

1. Fierce creatures of elemental destruction, whether armored or angry or otherwise upset or in aggressive poses intended to show off their status as apex predators, guardians, or, in some cases, the shackled mounts of other Fae creatures (which horrifies me to think of them as involuntary mounts).
2. Cute creatures of rounded lines and cartoonish proportions, often small, sometimes not much bigger proportionately than the other entities they are with.

Call it some sort of mental thing for me, if you like. As much as I give grief to all the other things in the Dragonriders of Pern that deserve every bit of it, it is a series that has managed to balance the majesty and size and power of the dragons involved while making them helpful to the people they are around. (Admittedly, the required telepathic bonds are still a form of shackles.)

I can't seem to find an artist who is able to make their dragons properly powerful and respected without making them hostile. My conception of dragons may be very different than anybody else's, but I'd like to believe that this is really just a small world problem and I haven't made the right connections yet.

That's a thing I've observed. Make of it what you like.