“A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse: a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.”*
Perhaps I can lay the blame on the flowered skirts I’ve been wearing to the studio. Sumptuous skirts of recycled sari silk that, at the slightest breeze through the open windows of my battered red pick-up truck flutter up to orange alert levels as I drive through neighborhoods that are modest in the extreme.
“They all hold swords, being expert in war: every man hath his sword upon his thigh because of fear in the night.”*
Perhaps it is simply the warm, sultry weather, and the hydrangea that blooms profusely at the side of the studio steps. Or the fact that the Boy has been away, training on a watery border with a distinctly masculine retinue, equipped with body armor and weapons. (His re-training will include an insistence that every colorful description need not begin with the letter “F”.)
Suffice to say that my painting mood has turned to ancient texts and perennial themes...
The woman in the garden and the men in the night occupy two separate worlds, yet the walls are breached by the flight of tiny, fragile moths.
For the WWI soldiers, searchlights and biplane, I used several period illustrations and sculptures as reference, combining them in a montage.
Acrylic paint with silk and 22K gold leaf on Arches paper. 28 x 38 cm.
* Song of Solomon, King James version
2 comments:
WOW! This is very evocative and sort of scary.
for some reason, it reminds me of Frieda, though not in style, but maybe its the vivid colors and flowers.
Very nice!!!! It makes me catch my breath to look at it.
Thank you so much, Mary! It IS a strange kind of ritual to help one's own child into a uniform and into a situation such as I have described. Yet it is also a universal and ancient one.
Words are perhaps the tiny, soft moths that so easily cross barriers.
Meanwhile, there's enough of the rogue in myself, too, that I can whisper under my breath...
"...heave to, and prepare to be boarded!"
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