What You Seek Is Seeking You

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This series of paintings came from two sources: a lifelong love of classical mythology and the longings of my soul. Over the years they have merged to produce images that eventually call out to me to paint. I still have the textbook from my undergraduate mythology classes with Dr. Carrie May Zintl in my days at Mt. St. Agnes College and leafed through it many times to research allusions in the literature I was teaching to my own students at Mercy High School.

Stories, particularly ones as ancient as these, have layers of meaning when read as symbolic of the workings of psyche. In particular, James Hillman, a student of Jungian psychology and founder of its offshoot Archetypal Psychology, held that the polytheism of classical mythology represented in metaphor the multiplicity of selves that exist in all of us, the ones who are rageful, loving, jealous, power-hungry, or grieving, the full circus of what it means to be human.

I have always been looking for God but used to believe that God was “out there” and I had to prove myself somehow to be worthy. But a line attributed to the Sufi poet Rumi expresses what I have come to know: “What you seek is seeking you.” The desire is not one sided; it is mutual. And that is what started this series of paintings about Zeus and his pursuit of mortal women. If the feminine in these stories represents the human soul, then Zeus could be a metaphor for the power and majesty of the divine endlessly chasing her.

Now Zeus was a perpetually lustful god and could be a real jerk when trying to seduce those mortal women he was taken with, all the while hiding his pursuits from his jealous wife Hera. The first painting is “Zeus and Europa.” Zeus enticed this Phoenician princess who was picking flowers by the sea by turning into a gentle, sweet-smelling bull. Europa was smitten with this giant beast and got on his back to ride him, whereupon Zeus the Bull plunged into the ocean and spirited her off to the island of Crete. Thus began the mythic foundation the Minoan civilization founded by their offspring King Minos.

This next painting (and my first oil painting) is “Zeus and Danae.” Danae was the only daughter of King Acrisius of Argos who had been warned by an oracle that he would die at the hand of his grandson. To prevent any conception, Acrisius locked his daughter high up in an impenetrable tower. But Zeus became enamored with her and was able to reach her as she slept, becoming a shower of gold that filtered through the lofty window. The child of this union was the hero Perseus of Medusa slaying fame.

Finally, “Leda and the Swan” is a myth that W. B. Yeats used is his poem by that same name (included at the end). Leda was the Queen of Sparta when Zeus fell in love with her. Taking the form of a swan, he pretended to be fleeing from an eagle to gain her sympathy and “protection.” Of course, the double twin progeny of Zeus and Tyndarius, the King of Sparta were Helen of Troy (Zeus) and Klytemnestra (Tyndarius) and Castor (Tyndarius) and Pollus (Zeus). Each set of twins had one semi-immortal and one mortal child. In this painting I used as a reference photo for Zeus/Swan a photo from Sir Matthew Bourne’s production of Swan Lake that flipped genders, replacing the female dancers with an all-male corps of dancers. The final scene of the film Billy Elliot has a grown-up Billy getting ready to leap onto the stage in his swan costume. I never tire of seeing the look of astonished love on Billy’s father’s face as he watches from the audience!

All three of these paintings echo the art that God creates in souls: With Europa, the foundation of community; with Danae in her vulnerable acceptance, the hero who slays the maker of stone hearts, Medusa; with Leda, the twin natures, mortal and immortal, in us giving birth to great beauty out of incompleteness, touching the face of the divine with cracked fingers and oil paints that I am still learning to use.

…………………………………

Leda and the Swan
by W. B. Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

A Joyful Longing

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We are all born with hunger. The physical kind, yes, for mother’s milk but also for something more later in life that the physical does not seem to satisfy though many of us go after the physical with a vengeance. Then there is the emotional hunger for a mate, for lots of friends, for children. I could go on and on talking about desire in its many forms, all grounded in the great desire for LIFE. Hiding in all these desires, though, is a deeper longing for something that goes beyond, the MORE one cannot quite name. I call it God, but that is only one of many names. It took me a good deal of my life, many years of meditation, and the remediation of wayward goals and mistaken directions for me to understand that all of my longings are really longing for God who is like a bird that gives glimpses of its beauty up close but flies beyond, just out of reach.

This is what this first painting was made to say. I had some leftover painted rust from an earlier painting and spread it on another canvas put aside until an idea struck. The rust felt like my aging body with its chattering joints and chugging motion every time I looked at that canvas on the shelf. But I am good today because my living has become more deeply told in a bigger story. I still feel the longing but it is a joyous longing when I can get quiet enough to listen for the whoosh of a bird’s wing that has been flying with me all along just out of reach and wholly present.

This painting of Our Lady, Gatherer of Spirit, came after the one above. The trees here are sunk into texture paste and the light comes from all directions shining on her love of birds. I envy my friend Joan for the hummingbirds that visit her deck. I have set out red-juiced feeders and planted the tubular flowers that are supposed to attract them. No luck. However, there is a fish crow that hangs out in the backyard tree who yells at me with his native two-noted twang. He watches me watch him. I am grateful for his noisy company.

I read a lot of the 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich (“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”) She was an anchoress who lived in a tiny shelter attached to St. Julians church in Norwich. It is said that there was a window that faced the street through which she offered spiritual counsel to people who passed by. In this painting I see her in the morning, drinking a cup of tea maybe and singing with her friend the yellow bird. I am convinced it was a happy song, full of joy.

Family

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This latest group of paintings has really crystalized around the concept of family even though not all are family members. This first painting is of my grandmother, my father’s mother, who emigrated from Poland as a young woman. She arrived in this country via Brazil (though I have no idea why–if anyone knows, I’d love to know too). People have said that I resemble her, and I painted this from a black and white photograph taken when she was a young woman. But I have added the color: the rug, the Klimpt-like garden, the potted palm, and tried to imagine what she felt coming to this new land with its new language with a new husband from her home and everything she knew. Such courage she must have had!

This next one is a work in progress (I am still seeing mistakes and areas that do not photograph well). My younger sister Claudia is an avid gardener and collector of sunsets. I am afraid that this does not do her justice. But the broccoli she holds is a symbol of the life she brings and the love she bears for the rest of us (there were eight sibs in our family, and we managed to grow up without killing one another).

I was playing one day with asemic writing (scrawls on paper that look like writing but have no semantic content) on different backgrounds. When I pasted fragments on canvas, this lady holding books asked to be painted. And so I did. She became the English Teacher with words flowing from her head instead of hair. I don’t think I will ever lose her as one facet of my identity. I think those who lived inside of books as I did (reading the Encyclopedia while hiding beneath tables amid loud family “discussions” and clearing whole library shelves at the local Enoch Pratt library) can relate.

Finally, Lady Wisdom makes another visit to the sanctuary inside my head. She has been a persistent presence in my psyche all of my life, and I honor her always. She is the one who has turned the light of day into stained glass, teaching that there is holiness even in the most mundane in this gift of life.

The Old and the New

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During March and April it is cold one day and warm the next or it is near freezing in the morning and 80 degrees by afternoon, the time of year when the old and the new converge. This series of paintings begins with one that expresses my feelings about living in this early spring in these chaotic times–exhaustion. I am this poor lady nodding off in her chair, too tired to make it to her bed, remembering what it was like when the news cycle was finite and truth didn’t depend on the mood of the speaker.

Then I think about what it would be like to sit against an ancient wall and rest my joints like the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet: “I am a-weary, give me leave awhile: Fie, how my bones ache! what a jaunt have I had!” I am also reminded of Joseph Campbell’s description of aging. He said that it was like driving a jalopy: you are riding down the road on a sunny day and hear a crash. “Oh my, there goes the fender.” Then the next day: “Wow, my muffler just hit the road.” Each day something else bites the dust. But one can always bring home flowers. There is beauty even in diminishment.

Yes, I never tire of spring. I needed to follow the burden of beauty in the previous painting with the inception of beauty commanded by the flying flower goddess…is this Persephone, the one just coming to the surface after her winter sojourn with her husband Hades in the not-so-merry land of hell? (Well, this past winter kind of felt that way, anyway, a real-life version of Dante’s Cocytus imprisoning traitors with Satan in the center if this frozen lake; the traitors in this case being sky-high heating bills.)

Finally, I appealed to the Quan Yin, the revered Bodhisattva of Compassion in Chinese Buddhism. She is also known as the Goddess of Mercy. I am posting this on Divine Mercy Sunday, the Sunday after Easter, that the Polish saint, Faustina, created, a chaplet of repetitive prayers that appeal over and over: “For the sake of His sorrowful passion, have Mercy on us and on the whole world.” We need a lot of this. A whole lot….

Multiplicity of Self

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I have spent the last few months doing self-portraits in response to a prompt from my little group of artists that meet to show our works to one another and to talk about the Jungian images in them. Interestingly, the view of myself differed depending upon the day and the mood, the leaning of my mind, and the tendency of my heart. The first one (the one above) is the inner self, the song in the heart of stones, the twin aspects of conscious and unconscious in friendship.

The second one is one with a life-model–me in a mirror, the only live thing in my house other than my cat Francis. While I was painting, I was concerned about the shapes I saw in my face and where the light was coming from. I wasn’t lamenting a sagging chin or the deepening nasal-labial lines. It led me to laugh about what had I been so concerned about: now my face is, well..my face. I kind of like it.

This one, a transfer from a painting on acetate, has a kind of dreamy feel to it. She reminds me of my grandmother and my Nowakowski kin. When I squint my eyes at the image in the page, I can almost hear my Uma’s powerful contralto voice unfurling like a moonflower, calling our Northwood neighborhood in to sleep to the phrases of Brahm’s Lullaby.

This is me falling apart. I do it often. I must have just watched the news before painting this one. I think it must have been particularly bad that day, but, really there are so many.

This final one is a painting not of me but of the archetypal energy that I am channeling in this stage of my living: The Crone. Also known as Hecate or the third stage of the moon’s triple goddess, the Crone hangs out with her crows and black dogs to bring an intense magic to the world touched by women of my age who know so much but also know that they know so little in the vast ocean of mystery.

Living Colors

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I think that one can live one’s life in black and white where things are right or wrong, good or bad, sacred or profane; if it’s not the one, it’s the other. Or I one can live life in colors that mirror the splendor of the sun’s rising and setting, the hues of plants and trees and flowers, the pallets of character and feeling set up in the human heart to paint one’s days. In my living room are hanging the paintings I have completed in the past four years showing my development as an artist. But my life has its own gallery of days. There are some times that are not very skillful but filled with the childhood exuberance of feeling the sheer joy of smearing paint with my fingers across slick paper. Then there are drawings of days when the lines did not connect of complementary colors that mixed to mud on the page when I was trying to be loved in the only way I knew how and messing things up royally. But in walking the halls of this gallery, I see days now with beauty that I once thought to be only ugliness, strengths that I thought were weakness, and joy in my deepest sorrows. It has not been a black and white life. These two new paintings reflect what I hope will be the remainder of my days.

Advent: From Darkness to Light: The Journey of Creation

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‘Tis the season…of darkness and waiting but not of desolation. There is a richness in this darkness which gestates the brightness of hope. This painting is about planting seeds of love deep in the earth to rise into the heaven to become stars that light the path to the archetype of the Divine Child, Jesus, yes, but also new life in all its forms, the creative sparks from the unconscious that implant in the womb of mind to become a painting, a poem, a new idea, a vision of peace.

The Black Madonna Series

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Dark Madonna

She knows in whose boredom the sun sleeps.
She studies space, fixes images in their absence,
hangs portraits the masters never saw
in their crafty light. Interrupts the talk
of dragonflies attending all creation.
She is the holder of pain, the unmoved target.

I wonder who this woman is
who moves as separately as silence,
who pauses to applaud a renegade dogwood,
red in still-green autumn, understands
the bloody revolution of ticking clocks,
the second-hand arrows that pierce
the flesh but leave it whole.

I hear her coming. She whispers between
the folds
of perception:
you will believe:
there is nothing left

but love.
-Kitty Yanson

I first became acquainted with the Black Madonna sometime in the early 1980s after getting sober, after my divorce, when I was trying to get through depressive episodes without the liquid medication I had used to try to treat them. First, it was a picture of Our Lady of Czestochowa in my ancestral Poland which drew me toward her, then I searched out others, the Dark Madonnas of Spain, and the one enthroned in Chartres Cathedral. Eventually, I found that she was indeed an archetypal presence in the psyche, a sister of the Hindu Kali, the apocryphal Lilith, and the Egyptian Isis. In all of these forms, she embodies the union of opposites: life and death, spirit and matter, the conscious and the unconscious, body and soul. For me back then, she was the hope I had for healing and wholeness, and so she remains with me today, as I continue to find new ways to create while my body, beginning its 77th year this week, reminds me with a new ache every morning that mortality is destiny, a part of life. This image of this Great Mother, both womb and tomb, comforts me, sings me awake and to sleep in endless cycle of God. These three paintings are my way of exploring her great truth without words.

This Is What Community Looks Like

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I had been feeling so helpless and alone before the No Kings Rally where I saw so many people who also feel that we are going in the wrong direction in America. The method I used in this painting is called negative space painting. Out of a chaos of color on the canvas, I found people hanging out together and painting a grey background around them, then adding details to define the them, capped off with a lady from my generation. Something tells me that I knew her from the 1960s!

Insistent Joy Series

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It has been hard lately to stay optimistic in this time of unsettled turmoil and division. One way I have been trying to cope is to look for moments of joy in my daily life, whether it be my cat Francis acting like his silly self or the heavy yield of moonflowers over my front entrance or a phone call from a dear friend when a text will just not cut it. Some days I have to work hard to keep my intention to joy ever on the lookout for golden moments (ok, some days a shiny piece of aluminum foil will have just have to do).

Painting this series is one of my ways.

Joy in the Forest of Blank.

This painting really is a collage of string for the trees and paint for the person. A study of contrasts, it reminds me, as C.G. Jung says, to hold the tension between the opposites until the third, the Transcendent, emerges. Not easy even on a good day.

Infestation of Humor

I love this goofy girl on her goofy horse infecting the grey forest with laughter. Heard and good jokes lately? There’s always cat videos!

Out of Chaos Comes the Dance

This canvas started as a repository for left-over paint, all globby and clashing. Then I saw people moving and trying to get free from their acrylic confines. I join them in my living room, often to Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love.” It’s hard to be sad when the blood is coursing and the breath is far from even. Join us!