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.
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!
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!
It swells like a bubble blown by breathing time: You are stroking the cat on your lap and suddenly know that this is Love and together you are in a boundless world the confines of the clock had kept you from. The cat gets up and stretches. You eat your breakfast.
Or you are on your morning walk, and Eddie’s dark face illuminates your route with “good morning” from his wheelchair where he sits cheering on the accelerating sun. You say good morning back, and check the heart rate on your watch.
Or you see the image of Our Lady on the wall, standing on a crescent moon with stars around her head. She becomes a doorway that opens just a crack to flash the glint of God. Then a draft of time slams it shut, leaving longing to stand eloquent as an angel with a flaming sword barring the entrance to Eden.
The decision now is yours: Believe each moment is a hiccup, hallucination, or errant imagining that has nothing to do with the redundant daily? Or maybe it is the Life living in life: an invitation to Truth that you never but always knew.
Many of you may know, but the moon in mythology was seen as an embodimet of the triple goddess, a reflection of the life of women in three-fold–maidenhood (Kore), the mature woman of child-bearing age (Selene), and the old aged Crone (Hecate). In this painting, the middle goddess is pictured as five women, reflecting the long adulthood that felt like many stages to traverse. The final stage, pictured as the moon is Hecate, the prototype of the Witch, the Enchanter, the Caster of spells. I am well into the Crone archetype myself and thinking about the power in this stage to enchant my world with meaning under a light that may be dimmer, but beautiful in its own right.
Hagia Sophia is often seen as the feminine of God; Lady Wisdom is how I’ve come to know her in my own spiritual path, a friend who has stuck by me whether I wanted her to or not in the moment. In this painting she invites us to tea and has included hazelnuts; I am often overwhelmed by the immensity of God in this incomprehensible universe. Julian of Norwich in her mystical text speaks to this. She reminds me in my hazelnut smallness that Love in its hugeness has a place for me as well:
“And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness.
“And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God. In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.
“But what is this to me? Truly, the Creator, the Keeper, the Lover. For until I am substantially “oned” to him, I may never have full rest nor true bliss. That is to say, until I be so fastened to him that there is nothing that is made between my God and me. This little thing which is created seemed to me as if it could have fallen into nothing because of its littleness. We need to have knowledge of this, so that we may delight in despising as nothing everything created, so as to love and have uncreated God. For this is the reason why our hearts and souls are not in perfect ease, because here we seek rest in this thing which is so little, in which there is no rest, and we do not know our God who is almighty, all wise and all good, for he is true rest. God wishes to be known, and it pleases him that we should rest in him; for everything which is beneath him is not sufficient for us. And this is the reason why no soul is at rest until it has despised as nothing all things which are created. When it by its will has become nothing for love, to have him who is everything, then is it able to receive spiritual rest.” (1st Revelation)
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.
There is a big God out there counting the stars as they pass through the gate to universal pastures, feeding each its eon-ration of cloudy nebulae.
I am, I am told, a distant relative of stars, a supernova memory in its death-belch of hydrogen and dust, heaven’s indigestion hardened into clay.
I am a quantum in creation, a second in divine expression, as brief as the urge to blink, wee as a fruit-fly’s toe, smaller than just a thought and justly as large.
There is a little God too (the same one, actually) who dances with mockingbirds on the hot asphalt lots, who summons tiny suns from mosses growing between paving stones, who dares into play the stuttering desires for rebirth and destruction.
This little God has a big job too shepherding stars and children, small in stature, large in being, across the quadrants of our park constructing the contagion of laughter under our earth-shining moon, to entangle us with hope.
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.
This past December I had a dream of a man standing with a very-pregnant woman. Her water breaks, and in this gushing river fish swim–many fish splashing in this prelude to birth. It was a simple dream, but one stocked with archetypal symbols and meanings of the Advent season. Then came the urge to paint in my sketch book, one image, then another. I’d go to sleep and wake up with yet another image. Another followed, then again, another. Finally, I thought I was through all the fish painting and then, in a session of unplanned intuitive art making, music notes on a piece of collage paper reminded me of a woman’s eyes. Fish Lady emerged. A fish jumped into her arms, a glorious fish with golden fins and scales. I asked her what all this was about, and she told me. This blog post is a storybook of images and lessons learned.
Yesterday, I started another painting…of a train from my childhood, the Little Engine that Could. Next to the track there is a stream. I was getting ready to pack up my paints for the day…a fish breached tissue-paper water.
Fish Lady Speaks
Fish Lady: I stand at the crossing between what you know and what you don’t. Don’t you like the gift I am bringing to you? It is a beautiful fish, at first pencil drawn then all blue, the color of the sky and the sea, all the fluidity of the outer and the inner, your daily mind in retirement that flows from one thing to the next without plan or methodology unless you are cooking a new recipe or learning a new lesson about how to paint shadows. Because the fish’s scales are gold tells that it is from God and needs to be eaten and consumed, digested and made part of your wholeness.
Me: But it is beautiful, Fish Lady! If I cook and eat it, it will be destroyed. I do not like that. I want to watch its beauty swim in my awareness.
Fish Lady: That is your need to keep things certain and in one form. But this gift allows all that beauty to go into your core, just as it is now hugged against my heart. I know that the physical act of eating no longer brings you the pleasure that it once did now that your taste buds are dull and confused, but maybe this is a call to eat of the spirit.
Me: I am aware that Jesus and fish are associated; if this is a call to buy the Jesus of religion and eat it completely, I am afraid that the bones will stick in my throat. It has always silenced me.
Fish Lady: You are stuck in the old stories and need to digest the beauty to become the beauty. The stories of Jesus you remember from childhood when he was all goodness and light even in the face of death, these are stories that float like beautiful clouds in the sky that produce the rain that becomes the sea that you find yourself in swimming with the fish that are now the gifts of mystery. Watching childhood stories, like watching the action in an aquarium, may calm but not sustain you in what you are doing now. You must slit the fish in its belly, pull out its innards, filet it, throw it into the fire, and eat it. That means finding Jesus in the missingness of taste you used to revel in, the pains in your face and joints, the cake you bring to your new neighbors, the squirrel on the back deck you fed with peanut butter, the conversation with the kid down the street who shoveled your walk who looks like a linebacker and wants to become a clothes designer, a visual, walking contradiction whose dreams you can support. You see God through curious attending to both mundanity and magnificence.
Me: And like the initial dream of the fish swimming in the water breaking before the pain of labor and the joy of birth, the work of dailiness is the catching, gutting, cooking, eating and digesting, avoiding the bones when I can. I am not sure I can.
Fish Lady: Yet you also dreamt one night of can openers. But can is not just a noun; it is a verb too. You are being invited to open your fears and have dinner…Take another look at my image. Did you notice that the only piece of collage visible still beneath the paint is the dictionary page. Dictionaries give definitions and meaning. Definition and meaning. There is more here to look for. Pay attention!
Memorizing the Laws of Gravity 