Ancestry
A showing of recent paintings of ancient people, ancient trees and ancient memories.

Women draw together in groups for comfort and gossip, to share joy and sorrow. They form a tight-knit geometrical triangle or perhaps a healing circle, close and enclosed, keeping out intrusions and threats, caring for children, reverencing the elders, and sharing wisdom. These are the faces of the mothers of us all--sacred, beautiful, always there.

Alas, it is not possible to know their actual faces or hear their voices. We can only search out names, dates and places where they lived. And if we modern humans are able to go to those places, the people whose families have lived there for centuries will resemble their ancestors , as we resemble our own ancients.

I use many historical references when painting these pieces, trying to get it right, and having been regressed, am able to refer to past-life experiences for visual information.

The blue is for the colour of woad with which early Scots painted their faces before performing a ritual or going into battle. The hoods and capes are what women have worn since the before the beginning of memory, woven from the wool of their own sheep, stitched by themselves, and dyed with the reds of madder and cochineal. The yellow-gold is the colour of the light of the sundown, or of the wheat field, or of the sacred amulet hanging on her breast, sometime providing a flash of brilliance when the light is just right.

In producing the landscape images, I am trying to illuminate the shape of the light in the trees. Oaks, being spiritual creatures, are the most difficult trees to paint, because there is always the feeling that I haven’t quite caught the essence or personality of the living plant. It is not only the shape of the branches but also the shape of the light, the negative spaces between the branches. Each tree has worked hard to get it right, to be as beautiful as it can be, and I am obligated to do it justice. If I put a moonrise into a painting, I refer to lunar charts to be sure of the direction in which the moon is coming up and showing through the trees.

These new landscapes are mainly from my recent trip through wine country, in Sonoma County, California. Since it is impossible to paint everything, I decided to focus on the oak trees and vineyards, as both are very ancient and symbolic in nearly every culture. Some are en plein air, some were started outdoors and finished in the studio, others are from my own photographs. In all of them I tried to evoke the living tree and how the colours of the light affect the shapes of the leaves and branches.

Each painting, whether figure or landscape, is layered with colours upon colours, some hidden, some obvious, but always there. I take this bit from the tradition of ancient stone carvers working in the medieval cathedrals. In some instances it is possible to put ones hand behind a panel of carving and feel a hidden layer of carving that can never be seen, but is there to be beautiful but known only to the carver. There are many instances of “hidden colours” in my paintings, beautiful but not seen.

4 July 2009