In the Dream Place There Are Stars

I was hoping to do another version of this painting—something darker and less sketchy—but since I don’t seem capable of that right now, this one will have to do. 

In the Dream Place There Are Stars, watercolours and gouache, 2023

All-Seeing

 The symbol of the all-knowing, all-seeing, many-eyed god belongs to an archetypal image in which the stars of the night sky appear as the eyes of the godhead. The link between the upper and lower regions is characteristic for diverse phases of the Great Mother’s rule. As goddess of the tomb, she rules over the world of the dead, but at the same time she governs the celestial world, whose luminaries are her eyes. 

~Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955/1963, p. 127

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These eyes have been watching me for a long time now, waiting to be released onto the page, into colour and form. Inspired, in part, by the eyes/scales in the background of a favourite image by Meinrad Craighead, Crow Mother, Her Eyes, Her Eggs, they also relate to another idea I’ve yet to realise, but hope to in time. 

They are not quite as I envisaged them, yet, they have been my way back into creating after a long, long break, a methodical and repetitive task to reawaken my painterly self. A new beginning. 

All-Seeing, watercolours and watercolour pencil on gesso prepared paper (2023)

Let There Be Darkness!

In gleaning words from old notebooks recently I came across an intriguing little tale I wrote at writers’ group way back in June 2017, using the prompt: In the sky there were no stars.

Seeing as the need for more generative darkness to counteract the distinct unenlightenment of our light-addicted culture has been an idea close to my heart for some time (see Endarkenment), I thought I would, after some extensive editing, share this story as one of possibility.

I preface it with this thought from a book I highly recommend:

Let there be darkness. 

The last truly revolutionary act left to human beings in the twenty-first century is to turn out the lights. Other acts are possible—acts we may call revolutionary—but they do not meet the criteria of the word as it must necessarily be interpreted today. Nothing short of turning out the lights will lead to an overturning of the endgame global system that now has us in its thrall. 

~ Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age, 2015, pp. 50–51

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In The Sky There Are No Stars

In the sky there are no stars. Even the moon is dimmed to invisibility by the ubiquitous light which forces its way up and down and sideways into every alleyway, every crevice, every potential shadow. 

My grandmother told me about the stars. She said they were like tiny pinpricks of light shining through a dark blanket, but I struggled to imagine them, for I knew only light and could not picture dark. 

Darkness is banished. Darkness almost never was. Everything is white, bright, glaring. Even at night, light intrudes, piercing through the window, so that we are never free of it. When we sleep it passes through our eyelids and enters our dreams. We have no peace.

I say we, but wonder sometimes if others think as I do, or if it is only me. 

Everyone is told, from the moment we begin to understand words, that it is the light that sustains us, that all that matters is its radiance. We are told to shun shadows, and never—but never!—to leave the safe confines of the constantly floodlit city, barricaded by a high white wall. We are told that on the other side there is nothing, and with light blinding our eyes we cannot see beyond at all. 

Though how is it possible that the world ends on the other side of a wall? And has anyone seen past it?

Such thoughts are dangerous, and I’ve been clipped round the ears more than once for staring into space, for imagining, for daring to contradict what I have been taught. Why should I even think of what is beyond the light? And why should such a word as escape come to mind? What do I need to escape from? Don’t we have all we need here in the City of Light?

It’s hard to explain these blasphemous thoughts. I want to call them dark, but since I don’t know what dark is, I can’t be sure of that word’s accuracy. Still, they remain in my mind, unknown ideas, impossible speculations, and I can’t shift them. 

I decided I had to try to find the darkness, for I believe what my grandmother told me about the stars: that they are still there, always there, behind the light.

Though in an eternally lit place where eyes can always see, it is not so easy to keep secrets, to do things undetected, but I made what preparations I could. I clothed myself in white, camouflaged myself with the only world I knew. I crept soundlessly and unseen to the foot of the wall, and began to climb the rough whitewashed stones. Perhaps they never expected anyone to try it, perhaps it had always been this easy. I pulled myself to the top, and over, and jumped down to the strange, unlighted earth on the other side. 

Now I was finally beyond all sight, free to discover the dark, to find and uncover the shrouded stars.

An illustration by Will Lytle, from Waking Up to The Dark

Our Lady of the Seeds

When I said that Our Lady of the Stars (my previous painting) was showing me the way, I did not understand how precisely that was meant. She was a diversion from the work I had planned, painted simply to use up a piece of gesso-prepared paper coated in an inky blue—the remains of an abandoned attempt at painting Solitude. Yet I think I had to paint her to be able to finally manifest Our Lady of the Seeds.

The idea-seed for this painting was planted a little over a month ago by Meinrad Craighead’s work, Sacred Hearts, the form of which suggested this figure to me, buried beneath a mound of earth, only her hands protruding, with greenery sprouting from her fingers. 

Meinrad Craighead – Sacred Hearts (1990)

Though the pose, with arms raised and hands held palms forwards—often referred to as the gesture of invocation—came from an image of Hera which caught my attention in The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford (p. 312). This also gave me the design for the dress, decorated with square ‘fields’ with dots (perhaps seeds?) pricked into the middle of each one.

I also referred to this image of Thracian Kybele from Max Dashu’s visual presentation, Magna Mater / Isis of 10,000 Names. 

When I scribbled down my initial drawings I knew immediately who this figure was, and had some idea of how I wanted her to look, with a colour scheme very similar to Meinrad’s image—reddish brown earth and green-blue foliage emerging from darkness. Yet try as I might (with three seperate attempts!), I couldn’t get the paint to behave as I wanted it to. Whether this was due to my own lack of technique, or wayward materials, I can’t say. Probably a little of both. 

Yet the potency of the image was such that I knew I couldn’t just give up. So I decided to take an entirely different approach, simplifying it to a mixture of just two colours—ultramarine and burnt umber—laying a wash over freshly gessoed paper to create an initial symbolic (albeit invisible) link between the earth and the sky. 

The day after I applied the wash I read the first message of the nine-day Novena of Our Lady of Woodstock, and it inspired a sudden realisation: the sky and the earth are not separate—Our Lady of the Stars is Our Lady of the Seeds!

Sometimes I need reminding of the things I already know.

Our Lady of Woodstock said:

You believe that plants rely upon dirt for their life, but I tell you that the Dark is dirt. Darkness bears the seeds of the cosmos in Her womb, and out of those seeds—which you call stars—all things have their being and their life.

Stars and seeds are one and the same—stars seeding the cosmos, seeds seeding the earth; the dark of space and the dark of the soil the same Darkness, the same ultimate Source of Life.

Suddenly my painting had direction and I felt far more confident about what I needed to do. She emerged without too much incident or difficulty, though with a great deal of patience and attention to detail. She is not at all as I envisaged, but entirely different, entirely what she needed to be.

I feel that I may still return to this idea again at some stage, perhaps to make another attempt at manifesting her as I originally saw her. But for now I am just glad she has come through at all.

As with all of my art, she is available on Redbubble.

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

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)

Wise Words: The Blinding Of The Stars

We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us – the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it. On almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world.

The blinding of the stars [due to light pollution] is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlines. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation … And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. A constant and formidably defining exchange occurs between the physical forms of the world around us, and the cast of our inner world of imagination.

(Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places, Granta Publications: London, 2007, pp. 202–203)