For more than a month I’ve been working sporadically on this painting, wondering if I would ever complete it, grappling with problems (despite doing more preparatory planning than usual), and in particular feeling confronted by the many colours.
As I’m not much of a colourist I tend to use just a few related tones, but this painting demanded much more, and who was I to deny the muse?
I’m still unsure how successful an image this is—it’s so bright!—but it has been growing on me.
I realised only recently that the light sides of the moons face away from the suns in each corner. An oversight, perhaps, but this is because the suns were a late addition to the design, and the moons were always intended to receive their light from the centre, from source. Ultimately, the suns do too.
Here, I repeat the symbols that keep returning: bird, snake, moon, spirals and hands.
The title refers not to earth and sky being one and the same, but to their being connected, and thus part of the whole. (For more on this idea please see my previous post Resacralising the Sky.)
As with all my art, this image is available from my Redbubble shop.
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| When Earth and Sky Were One, watercolours, gouache, and gold and copper acrylic on gesso prepared paper (2021) |
i think it is successful! and the bird and snake, that ancient pair, are such a clever way of symbolising the two opposite-but-complementary impulses of life in so many ways, at least as conceived of by humans: the freedom and mystery of flight and the sky realms, and the incubation and mystery of the chronic realms... our ancestors seem effortlessly to have grasped that both are integral to life, and reverenced the birds and the snakes as their representative beings. no accident perhaps, too, that both birds and (most) snakes are egg layers, the egg being the ultimate symbol of life/rebirth. and there it all is, in your painting.
ReplyDeleteThank you! I just can't get over the colours. I'll be going back to my usual murkiness for my next paintings, I think.
DeleteA very striking image - something remarkably primal about the whole work!
ReplyDeleteThank you, Malcolm. I'm glad you think it is primal! :)
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