I Am Still Here, With Books

It has been lovely to be quiet in this space while I work on other things, but I just wanted to pop in to say that I am still here, and I do hope to return to posting a little more regularly as soon as I can. 

More art is being birthed in my studio, though the technique I am using is time-consuming, so progress is slow; and if I am not happy with a work, I begin again … and again. Hence, I don’t have anything new to reveal as yet, but I am working on something.

In other news, I’ve been *trying* not to buy books, as things got more than a little out of hand last year, but a few more have entered my collection. The first is Marija Gimbutas’ The Language of the Goddess, which (to be fair) I had been trying to get hold of since I began Witchlines last February. It’s proving to be a veritable treasure trove of imagery and ideas, which I intend to use to inspire my own artistic work.

Since our ancient ancestors lived so close to the earth, this is reflected in the art they made, which, though it often features the human form, also has a strong connection with the nonhuman and the numinous. Furthermore, they made much use of multivalent symbols, which I find particularly fascinating. These symbols and signs are doorways into meaning, into the sacred; and the work Gimbutas has done in deciphering them, and bringing the world of Old Europe back into consciousness, is invaluable.

The next books I have acquired are The Shetland Notebooks and Sketchbooks by Kate Walters—a sequel to her beautiful Iona Notebooks (2017), from Guillemot Press. I have loved Kate’s work for a number of years, so this is a special treat, particularly as it came with an exquisite original watercolour, which I adore. 

I’m going to enjoy the process of allowing these intimate embryonic paintings to seep in to nourish me from the inside, and hopefully also to emerge again, transformed, in my own art. 

Earlier this month I was also lucky enough to see the incomparable Margaret Atwood speak about her dystopian fiction at the Sydney Opera House, and got a couple of books signed by the ‘goddess of the north’ herself. 

So, while the last few months have been very difficult, right now I am feeling so very fortunate.

Messenger of the Invisible

It has taken me some time to complete (and then photograph) this new painting, mainly because midway I experienced (I suspect) some kind of fatigue-inducing virus, which meant—to my frustration!—that I did almost nothing for about a week. Also, it was initially intended to be nothing more than an ‘experiment’, but clearly I need to have a little more faith in myself and what I can create, for I am very pleased with the results.

Messenger of the Invisible, watercolour and gouache on gesso prepared paper (2019)

I have not been writing, and thus feel unable to say much more at present, but I am including some quotes below that elucidate some of the ideas behind this work, and what she represents. All are taken from the absolutely brilliant book I have been reading by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (Arkana: London, 1991).

The bird who appears out of a distant sky has always been a messenger of wonder as the visible incarnation of the invisible world. In many Bronze Age myths the cosmic egg of the universe was laid by the Cosmic Mother Bird, and its cracking open was the beginning of time and space. (p. 13)

The bird was the life of the waters, the epiphany of the goddess as the deep watery abyss of cosmic space and as the seas and the rivers, underground wells and streams. The bird that flies high above the earth and the bird that swims on waters resting upon the earth linked two dimensions that were not the native element of human beings yet surrounded them above and below. The image of the bird at home in both dimensions brought the upper and lower waters together, offering an image of a unified world. (pp. 58–59)

The bird, since Palaeolithic times the messenger of the vast incomprehensible distance and so of the whole invisible world, was taken by the Minoans, as by many another culture, to constitute the supreme image of epiphany. (‘Epiphany’ in Greek means literally the ‘showing forth’ of the sacred, which is the presence of the divine recognized as immanent in creation.) (p. 124)

The moon was an image in the sky that was always changing yet was always the same. What endured was the cycle, whose totality could never be seen at any one moment. All that was visible was the constant interplay between light and dark in an ever-recurring sequence. Implicitly, however, the early people must have come to see every part of the cycle from the perspective of the whole. The individual phases could not be named, nor the relations between them expressed, without assuming the presence of the whole cycle. The whole was invisible, an enduring and unchanging circle, yet it contained the visible phases. Symbolically, it was as if the visible ‘came from’ and ‘returned to’ the invisible – like being born and dying, and being born again. (p. 147)

Mothertongue

This work follows on from my previous painting, concerning the ancestral voices going back seven generations, the thread of knowledge that we may be able to learn how to grasp once more. Only this time, I acknowledge too the original guardians of wisdom, the serpents who are at the core of the mythologies of so many cultures around the world; the snakes that women once spoke to, and danced with, and welcomed into their houses with bowls of milk.

I attempted to get the paint to crack again, though the result is not as even as it was the first time. Yet it is enough. I am embracing imperfection, learning how to work with the things that do not go to plan, and create what I need to create anyway. 

I am finding that painting is something that I can do at the moment (little by little), in contrast to writing, which requires a kind of mental energy I just can’t summon. Though I miss playing with words, and feeling stories flow through me, I am instead speaking through images, and returning to ideas that tugged at my heartstrings half my lifetime ago. If I can, I am going to follow this serpentine thread back into the heart of things. Maybe it will lead me to my mothertongue—my inner wisdom, and the wisdom of my foremothers—which will give me the knowing and language I need to speak with words once more. 

And now the words ‘mother tongue’, language, widen out for me, as I see that the relationship to the one who has given us birth, and to that universe which engendered our being, might be the same as our relationship to language: we must trust words and the coming of words. (Susan Griffin, from ‘Thoughts on Writing: A Diary’, in Made from this Earth: An Anthology of Writings by Susan Griffin, Harper & Row: New York, 1982, p. 230)

Mothertongue, watercolours and gouache on gesso prepared paper (2019)