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
i did my senior art history thesis paper on a mantagna painting... long ago, that seems!
ReplyDeletei'm glad that you finished your piece. it's a very good image of what you describe: the mirror self, the hidden self, the deep self, growing its roots as it is fed by the radiance of All That Is. maybe we only begin to grow properly when we acknowledge (or remember) our hidden selves, and consciously reach up and root down at the same time?
Thank you. Yes, that idea of connecting with both upper and lower realms, or the movement of energy from sky to earth, is something that I keep seeing in my work. I think everything needs to be connected for balance and wholeness to be found.
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