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Kitty YansonLeave a comment

Sometimes doing art is a kind of healing. This painting, in particular, began with a memory of a moment many, many years ago, my earliest memory, I think. My not-yet-huge family was standing on a hill watching an itinerant carnival spinning a ferris wheel and merry-go-round on a lot in Northwood. A very small me, little more than a toddler, was circling my father, round and round, my hand self-tethered to his knees. But when I looked up, my father’s face wasn’t there. A strange man stared down at me. Of course, I was terrified by my father’s seeming disappearance. It was a momentary separation, but one that carved a missingness that has lived all these years in me.

During my meditation practice recently, I saw the idea of this painting: What if I sat with God on that hill of my imagination looking at horses freed from the merry-go-round and a ferris wheel turning in the stars? What if we looked together at the missingness that lives in the center of all relationships to see there the longing for completeness as a holy quest. I think that my own father, now in heaven living in perfect love, understands this now. I feel him scooping me up to look at the stars he loved so much. “Look, Kitty, that is Orion the Hunter and that bright one in his belt is Betelgeuse, one of the great navigational stars.” It brought him home when he flew rescue missions in the South Pacific during World War II. It guides me home today.

Painting the Dames

Kitty YansonLeave a comment

This month has brought images in my sketchbook–paintings of the ladies who live with me in the little world of my head and heart. The first began using a Chagall portrait as my inspiration. My black cat Francis (who is growing purple with age and irritation) sat next to her, then a goldfish plopped in a bowl. I call this woman Lady C for Lady Creativity.

Then I had a dream that above a Gothic doorway was inscribed “Vocatus atque non vocatus Deus aderit” (Called or uncalled, God will be present), the inscription that C.G. Jung had above the doorway to his home and the office where he saw his patients. So Lady Creativity in the next painting stormed that door, mirroring my daily prayer that I borrowed from Darius Bashar, a meditation teacher on The Artist Morning website (https://www.artistmorning.com/.

Dear God, it goes, Please use me as a vessel for your divine expression. Use me as an instrument for your love. Give me the strength to go into the depths of my heart to find my truth and the courage to speak my truth in my own authentic voice. Whatever happens from there, I let go and let God.

In his approach to meditation, Darius uses Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, a book I highly recommend to all creatives to help to feed their souls.

Then, I revisited my old friend Lady Wisdom, to me both a representation of Sophia, the feminine aspect of God, and an embodiment of the Great Mother Archetype. Francis my cat and the goldfish return again, but as I was painting, I saw skulls with flowers bloom while Lady W prayed the rosary of years. She became Baba Yaga, a Slavic fairytale figure with the characteristic doubleness of all archetypes: the benevolent grandmom and the witch who lives in a hut in the forest and terrifies children (which was, perhaps, the hidden reason why I thought 70 some years was the age when I would begin to terrify my students–though some of my former would say that I started much earlier than that). So Baba Yaga is here:

Finally, I had to render another Lady W, standing before the triple trees of life, representing, perhaps, the triple lives of women: maiden, mother, and crone. She wears a cloak of spirals and the moon in her hands. Someone once told me that living was like moving up a continuous spiral up the core of ignorance; when you start up the climb, you are flat up against the core of ignorance, so you cannot see what you do not know, the bricks of the core blind you in their proximinty. But as you ascend farther up and farther away from that core, you begin to see how much you do not know, and when you get to this age, it’s a heck of a lot. But at the same time, you can see the layers of circles you have traveled, the mistakes made over and over again, the former selves that have transformed and reshaped who you are today: the lady of wisdom, of knowledge and ignorance.