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)

Solitude

Perhaps this work speaks for itself. Isolation was on my mind, as it has been for most of us lately. However, it was really prompted by beginning to reread a book about the Symbolists, which mentioned the influence of Mantegna on many French and English Symbolist artists, especially his depiction of rock formations, and ‘tendency to load every rift with ore’.* And this image came, almost complete, to my mind’s eye. 

Yet, though it may look like an image of isolation, for me it is more about solitude, which has, potentially, a more positive and fertile element to it—a meeting with the hidden self, thriving beneath our everyday consciousness, while some mysterious source feeds from above.

I was not sure I would complete this image. Once again nothing was going right. But I persisted, and as I (un)painted, I came to an understanding with it.

For anyone who is unaware, all of my art is available as stationary and other products via Redbubble.

Solitude, watercolours, gouache and acrylics (2020)

*Edward Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art, Thames and Hudson: London, 1972, p. 12

Wise Words: Constantly Transforming

… finitude and limitation are rooted in the structure of our lives. There is no permanence in our finite lives, there are no absolutes, there is no one person or thing we can count on to provide meaning in our lives as we move through time and change … I believe that women’s spiritual quest and feminist thealogy are drawing all of us, women and men, to accept finitude and change, to live in and through it, without trying to escape it. Thus the “deformation” of mystical language I … am proposing is that we give up the quest to ally ourselves with a transcendent source or power which is beyond change, which is unaffected by that which comes into being and dies. For me the goal of the “mystical” quest is to understand that we are part of a world which is constantly transforming and changing.

(Carol P. Christ, Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest, second edition, Beacon Press: Boston, 1986, p. xiv)