Tag: painting

Multiplicity of Self

Kitty Yanson2 Comments

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.

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.