Category: spitituality

What You Seek Is Seeking You

Kitty YansonLeave a comment

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

Kitty YansonLeave a comment

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

Kitty Yanson4 Comments

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.