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EXPLORING FAITH & CREATIVITY
[left] Interior panel of Wilton Diptych. Egg tempura on oak panels. 1395. The National Gallery, London. [above] Verso. [below] detail of interior panel.
The white hart of the Wilton Diptych was the representative image on Life as Myth during 2007 [see left navigational column, Journal 2007]. In mythology the hart serves as spirit guide or divine messenger. In early Celtic mythology, for example, the appearance of a hart could indicate that the Otherworld was close at hand and that a mortal now stood on sacred grounds. In Arthurian legend, if one encountered a deer in the woods and followed its lead, then the individual immediately embarked on a great adventure.
We can look to the various myths as inspirational sources for our lives and as frameworks for meaning. Albert Camus said it best when he observed, "Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them." In other words, the myths are there as messengers and guides, but we must decide to engage, to breathe life into them, to follow the lure of a great adventure. My personal white hart myth includes both a life in the arts and, for the past ten years, a quest for the divine feminine. Looking back over the last decade, I can see how that particular framework for meaning has informed and shaped my life.
Very recently, while considering the panel above, the repeating hart motif caught my attention. Though it's possible that I have seen this painting before, I don't remember ever noticing the white hart. Art is full of mystery and points toward something just beyond words, just beyond our knowing. This image serves that function for me. It is a signpost, a perfect visual metaphor for my own private myth, the representation of the bridge between faith and creativity.
WINTER 2007
THE BIRTH OF VENUS
[left to right] The Montefeltro altarpiece [also known as Virgin with child, saints, angels and Federigo II da Montefeltro], Piero della Francesca, 1465. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. The birth of Venus. 1912. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Throughout the ages, stories with certain basic themes have recurred over and over, in widely disparate cultures; emerging like the goddess Venus from the sea of our unconscious.
Joan Vinge (b. 1948), writerAccording to Roman mythology, Venus is the Roman goddess of love, fertility and beauty. The castration of her father Uranus by her brother Cronus fertilized the ocean and from the fertile waters Venus arose. Artistic interpretations of her birth do not typically depict the actual birth but the moment when Venus arrives at the shores of Paphos (Cyprus) in a shell.
Over time Christian iconography incorporated the rich visual language of the ancient goddess. For example, Piero della Francesca includes the shell motif at the top of the Montefeltro altarpiece, providing a direct link to a more ancient mythic tradition of the goddess. Art historians interpret the incorporation of the shell as a way of portraying the rebirth of the pagan goddess in a more sacred form. The assimilation of pagan symbols was a prevalent one during the spread of Christianity.
WINTER 2007
A BOX ON MY HEAD
A farm mother and her child. ca. 20th Century. National Archives.
Someone in the southeastern United States recently bought one of my paintings and yesterday I mailed it to him. In order to save shipping costs, I packed the box myself. The end result weighed just over seven pounds and measured an unwieldy 33" by 41" by 3". In other words, though light in weight, the box was still long enough and wide enough to be extremely difficult to carry. Unwieldy-ness notwithstanding, since the Fed Ex satellite store was only a few blocks away, I decided to carry it there myself. o carry it there myself.
While making my way up Broadway, the box slipped and shifted constantly. I tried several ways of carrying it but none worked for very long. Finally I had an inspiration and lifted the box up to my head and in that way I successfully made it to the Fed Ex store. What a comical sight I must have made, like some Dr. Seuss imagining -- a quite tall, so freckled, white lady with a box growing out of her head.
Which brings me to what happened yesterday on the way to the Fed ex store: I experienced the workings of my mythic eye. My lens on the world is my "mythic eye." That means I tend to use symbols and metaphors when interpreting the world around me. And yesterday my mythic eye contemplated the spectacle of walking down Broadway with a box growing out of my head and saw something larger.
It's kind of hard to explain but in that particular moment I felt connected to other women, possibly all other women, women and how they work through their day, whether raising children or governing countries or walking around with boxes on their head. And I saw my part in that bigger picture as both unique and yet also universal. For a few moments I experienced the beautiful groove of my life and how amazing that felt to be in it. And interestingly, that moment came not at my easel -- but while managing the details of my daily life.
(top to bottom) A group of women weaving, Italy, ca. 1900; Olga Preograjenska, Russian prima ballerina, 1896; Charlotte Brontë, writer and poet, 1854; Ellen Terry, British actress, as Beatrice in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, 1908; A mother and children walking, San Francisco, ca. 1910; Rosa Parks, civil rights activist, pictured here with Dr. Martin Luther King, 1955; Mahalia Jackson, gospel singer, 1962; A group of polio ward nurses, 1958; Virginia Woolf, feminist writer, 1882-1941
