Isness: The Symbol

Three years ago, when I was deep in my Witchlines studies of Old Europe, this symbol came to me, but it is only now that it became ready to come into being as a painting.

Triangles and arcs have made regular appearances in the art I have made over the past few years, and in some ways this symbol is their origin—this manifestation of emergent being, of above and below, sky and earth, of difference within wholeness.

I felt such a sense of enjoyment as I worked on this painting, of things coming together, of creativity flowing. I think it was worth the wait.

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A symbol was the physical demonstration of a community’s recognition of the unity underlying apparent diversity.

(Michael Dames, The Silbury Treasure: The Great Goddess Rediscovered, 1976, p. 81)

The image is sacred, for it is this above all that binds that part of the psyche incarnated in time and space to the unseen dimension that enfolds it. 

(Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, 1991, p. 484) 

A sacred image was not an illusion but the possessor of reality itself … 

(Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary, 1976, p. 292) 

Symbols are seldom abstract in any genuine sense; their ties with nature persist, to be discovered through the study of context and association. 

(Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization, 1991, p. xv)

The theorists of the Symbolist Movement recognized that the symbol could be something that existed in its own right, diffusing a mysterious influence around itself, and affecting the whole context in which it was placed. Its operations were by no means completely predictable. 

(Edward Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art, 1972, pp. 16–18)

Isness, watercolours, gouache and Japanese ink on gesso prepared paper (2021)