Sacred Mountain

I’ve been playing with this idea for the past month, and being constantly frustrated in my attempts to bring it into being. I wanted to get it right, to have it be what it cannot help but be, and avoid starting paintings I couldn’t bring to fruition. My energy is limited, thus I wanted to get from beginning to end with as little twists in the road as possible.

I tried drawing slightly different designs, adding or subtracting details, and pondering colours or a lack of them. Yet nothing seemed right, the image thwarting my efforts to define it once and for all.

The lack of progress* (a word I hate, but I’ll leave it there) was causing me to fall into an all too familiar mindset: 

The why bother? perspective. 

The my work is not so important point of view. 

The it’s all too hard stance.

It’s a good thing I’m stubborn, and that feelings do change. I decided that enough was enough and just got started, simplifying the image to its bare essentials, and reducing the size. 

It’s not entirely as I wished it to be, but I feel the elements I left out are not yet ready to manifest themselves, and I respect that. They will feed future work.

And I need to remember to be brave, to just play and explore. That I can, and must, silence the perfectionist voice and be content with whatever emerges.

The main inspiration came from this quote:

… Silbury Hill in Wiltshire is an immense conical mound, dating from Stone Age times, that resembles a birth-cone. Sacred mountains in general are of this form, with the tip missing, which is supposed to be the place where the earthly meets the other world. This can have a literal meaning is one takes the ‘other world’ to be the place where everyone was grown through the stages of gestation, up from the single cell through the animal series to the human baby. Everyone is then born through the birth-cone, or ‘axis of the universe’. In the emblems the sacred mountain is accompanied by a world tree haunted by serpents, and a spring of water. The shaman may climb such a tree to meet the gods … (Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove, The Wise Wound: Menstruation & Everywoman, 1978/1986, p. 180)

This image, I hope, contains both mountain and world tree; a spine-like fissure as the axis of the universe; and the marriage of earth with water/rain.

*A better alternative would be process.

Sacred Mountain, ink and felt tip pen (2020)