Everyday Goddesses.........

Our Lady of the Green Heart (2015)

Lately I've begun to paint again, tentatively and trying to find my hand again.  It used to be so easy!
Everything I make is an Icon, in one way or another.  And I also think, as I create portraits of people I know, that the Goddesses are great universal archetypes that belong to the Collective Sacred Mythos, etc., but............they also live right here, in the contemporary here and now, in real women.  

And thinking that, synchronistically, women have turned up who seem to embody those Goddesses - I snap pictures of them, and the Goddess looks out at me from them, smiling and at ease in the 21st Century just as much as 500 B.C.  A young Chinese doctor is staying at my house, and a Quan Yin mask is evolving from her compassionate face.  A beautiful German nurse is renting my guesthouse, and as she walks with such kind, lush, and un-selfconscious  beauty, I see Freya in scrubs, Goddess of love and healing and beauty.  

Green Heart (2009)

Anyway..........the first painting I have done, rusty as it is, wants to be called "Our Lady of the Green Heart".  But maybe she is also Gaia.

I wanted to make a better version of a self-portrait I did years ago (on right), but, although (I confess) I did use a younger picture of myself, the painting evolved in a whole new way, much more Iconic, and the expression, I like to think, both intelligent, joyful, and Ironic.   In other words, not without a great sense of humor about all of it.

Go figure.

This month has brought quite a few meltdowns, internally, for me,  A lot of endings, a lot of internal work, revelation, change.  Hecate seems to have been working with me indeed, and we're not out of the underground yet.  This is become my own "Winter of Listening", and I sink into the dark and quiet of November with deep gratitude.

But, and I think this is why I write this entry in this journal, I realize that it's important to listen to what the painting has been saying as well.  The beauty of art making is that the Conversation is not always visible at first, but it is always there.  And the painting, even as I enter a truly incubating time, is an Invocation for the future!  Even as I go underground in November, I see that I have painted a hope for the seeds of my spring.    And I say this without modesty, but gladly!

May we all be incubating Everyday Goddesses and Everyday Gods.

Hecate (1997)