She Knows: A Poem

she knows 

that she 

doesn’t know 

so maybe 

she is wise

Our Lady of the Stars

Doing this painting was a welcome diversion from, but also a stepping stone towards, another image that I am working on.

This is Our Lady of the Stars, and she is showing me the way.

Our Lady of the Stars, watercolours, gouache and gold acrylic on gesso prepared paper (2020)

Solitude

Perhaps this work speaks for itself. Isolation was on my mind, as it has been for most of us lately. However, it was really prompted by beginning to reread a book about the Symbolists, which mentioned the influence of Mantegna on many French and English Symbolist artists, especially his depiction of rock formations, and ‘tendency to load every rift with ore’.* And this image came, almost complete, to my mind’s eye. 

Yet, though it may look like an image of isolation, for me it is more about solitude, which has, potentially, a more positive and fertile element to it—a meeting with the hidden self, thriving beneath our everyday consciousness, while some mysterious source feeds from above.

I was not sure I would complete this image. Once again nothing was going right. But I persisted, and as I (un)painted, I came to an understanding with it.

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Solitude, watercolours, gouache and acrylics (2020)

*Edward Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art, Thames and Hudson: London, 1972, p. 12