Description
There is so much to say about this painting! I’ve written a journal post about it while I was working on it. In this post I share the time and place of the source images and the progression that led to the idea to paint it. Rather than repeat that here, I’ll share the process of actually creating this painting. The creative work for some of my paintings actually starts in Photoshop, piecing together parts of several photos. More than any other, this one was defined as a piece of digital art first. The original photograph, of me – standing in front of a clock inside the Musee d’Orsay in Paris – has substantial parts of the clock blocked by the structure of the building and the clock’s supports. I wanted to include some of this structure, to keep the spirit of place, without having it be too heavy and encumbered looking. Since, in my painting, I don’t make it up as I go, I needed the reference image to be well defined and refined before I even started drawing – which took many hours. Before drawing it, I shared the image with many people in my life, generating enthusiastic responses across the board as something altogether different for me – a new phase for my work. It was my niece Leigh who said she could see it really, really big and up on a ceiling. There does seem to be something cinematic about this image. The largest paper – in the heavy weight I like to paint on – dictates that I needed to paint this one at 40″x40″. In any case, painting it a lot larger would pose all kinds of logistical hurdles – that I’m not sure I’m ready for!
In my exploration of color and how it works, I’ve been curious about what might happen if I paint something using just three primary pigments. I used Phthalo Blue, Quinacridone Rose and Hansa Yellow Medium, which are very similar to the cyan, magenta and yellow in inkjet printers. Even the “black” in this painting is mixed from those three paints! The experience of painting this with just three colors was incredibly instructional and even in an odd way, freeing. If I needed to make a brown, or a dull, dark blue, I didn’t have to look to all the other paints on my palette, I had to find the color “solution” with just those three.
The name for this painting came out when I showed the finished reference image to Sister Mary, my spiritual director. She used the word “eternal” in response, which jumped out at me as the painting’s name. She described all the symbolism in it: the suggestion of a triangle indicates the Trinity, the roman numerals represent the human hand (one of the painters in my group noticed that the four is actually IIII instead of IV!), the X evokes the St. Andrew’s cross. And then, of course the rose which, besides being an anagram for “eros,” is so filled with symbolism and meaning. I find it remarkable that the little girl who ran around barefoot all summer and played hide-and-seek after dark with all the boys in Woodacre, is this feminine image. Most of my life I’ve had no idea that she was in me! I’ve learned from Alison Armstrong that the feminine is all about the eternal, yet we live our lives in a physical, time-bound world. It’s all here in this image – the eternal feminine framed in temporal world, supported by the masculine structure. Over a hundred years ago, there was a day when this clock first started keeping time; there will be a day somewhere in the future when it will stop, and in between, infinite moments when beauty can bring us into the experience of eternity.
February – March 2015
