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The Old and the New

Kitty Yanson1 Comment

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….

The Black Madonna Series

Kitty YansonLeave a comment

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.