Finding Balance and Lilith

Sorry I have been incommunicado for so long around here. I am coming out of a long period of a creative dry spell that coincided with the dog days of summer. I have felt completely disconnected from my spirit and fully immersed in the physical world and the day to day lately. But as the Autumnal Equinox approached I felt the old magic starting to return. I started to paint again and started to feel the presence of Lilith. I have been working on a Lilith painting for a couple of weeks now. Lilith is a powerful ancient goddess energy. I have been working with snake energy for so long now and they have appeared over and over in my work in the last year. It is so connected with the energy of the Divine Feminine, and is what we as women are constantly working with in this present moment. It is about transmutation, and sometimes I feel like I am working overtime transmuting energies.
Women have been told for so long that they can't be too powerful. Often, as we start to finally reach the potential of our own power, we pull back. We have been taught for thousands of years to pull back. When we pull back sometimes we pull back so far we have a hard time finding that power again. Lilith is a huge symbol for this. She was a very powerful woman. She refused to submit to Adam and stood up to him, she spoke and lived her truth. For this, she was turned into a demonic witch by the Patriarchal forces that were in power.
So within the myth is the symbol of how women still today collectively fear becoming too powerful. Look at women in our world with a lot power like Hillary Clinton, Oprah, Nancy Pelosi and look at how they are portrayed by the media. I just gave a bunch of examples of powerful Liberal leaning women, but look at how Sarah Palin is portrayed in the media, and you realize it doesn't matter what her beliefs or political leanings are, a powerful woman is usually slandered repeatedly. This is what we need to transmute. We need to transmute this fear of being too powerful and the fear of what the world will do to us if we step into our place of power.
Last night during the powerful Aries full moon and Equinox, I sat in a circle with some magical sisters and felt the power of this transmutation. It is very important now more than ever for us to be in community and to draw upon each others strengths to help us reach our own potential. I feel more balanced now and aligned with the current energies.
So here is just a little sneak peek of my Lilith's face. I haven't been taking WIP pics this time. I have been so immersed in her I haven't even stopped to take pics. I have tried to capture her allure, her strength, and yet a look of fear that represents that collective fear of our own power. I still have a lot of fine details to work on, but she is getting closer to complete.



Beyond that I have just been running the kids to and from school. I recently showed at the Kentucky Showcase at Awesome Inc. in Lexington. It opened during the last Gallery Hop in town and here is little pic of me at the reception with two of my pieces.



I just cut off a bunch of hair, it was getting pretty long before. Another sign I am letting go of the old and ready for the new that is yet to come. I hope everyone else is feeling the balance return too.

The Guardians, new WIP

Well the summer is almost over and I have felt uninspired most of the time. I had to paint a couple of paintings for upcoming themed exhibits. One was for the Tomato Art Festival in East Nashville on August 14th and the other was for a traveling exhibit called "The Womanly Art" that is being put on by the Southern Indiana La Leche League. Although I was very excited to paint both of these, my inspiration was slow to come, and both works took me longer than I had originally planned. Both works are finished now and posted on my redbubble profile.
I have had another work in my mind for weeks now. I had to wait to start her until I was finished with the before mentioned works. That was slightly hard for me. This painting began to permeate my every thought. I think I learned a lesson in patience though. I felt like I let the idea grow for awhile in my womb before I finally got to birth her, and I think the work is better because of this.
The piece is about the shift of consciousness that we are all going through right now. The energy is shifting all around us, whether we realize it or not. This work carries along the themes of "I Feel Fragile Today". The energies are going through us and we feel uncomfortable because we feel we are changing, but we don't really know what is happening to us. In this work I am trying to show that it is our connection to nature that will help guide us through this change.
The Guardians is a large 2x3 foot acrylic on canvas. Here she is in the early sketch phase.


And here is a detail of her face.


Here she is with the face coming to life and a bit of color in the background.


And then I worked her face some more. This is what she looks like right now.


I started painting her yesterday and was up way too late working on her. I am feeling like I am in complete painting bliss with her. I have a lot of detail to do on her that might take me a few weeks and I have a couple of trips coming up to see family. My kids start school again, already, in about 2 weeks. My time to paint is going to really open up then. I feel the Fall will bring lots of creations.

WIP "The Gifting"

I had this plan to do the three fates of Greek mythology one at a time. I was going to start with Clotho, the fate that holds the distaff and begins the weaving of the fate of each human. I am intrigued by the fates, and other web/weaving goddesses like Ariadne. They are often connected to the stars and spiders. Also the word faerie is derived from the Latin fata, or fate. It has been speculated by many that actual faeries were "people" with the gift of second sight, or the ability to see the future.
I wanted to do my Clotho in a very modern way or another one of my "pop surrealistic" goddesses. I started to work on the pencil sketch on a larger size (for me) 24x36 canvas.



I struggled with her face a little more than usual. Something about her really bothered me. I decided to give her my bangs for some reason. I almost think she looked too much like me and that was what was bothering me. I erased her face more than a few times and finally decided to just let it go and she would evolve once I started painting.



I sometimes do my sketches with a water soluble graphite pencil that does not need to be fixed before you add the acrylic paint. It ends up just blending away with the paint. For this painting I used regular old graphite and sprayed it with a fixative before I painted. I thought I wanted to leave a lot of the graphite lines showing, but now I am wishing I would have put a light coat of white gesso over it to dim the pencil lines a little; you live and you learn I guess. Here she is with an added hand:



I have drawn a barn owl in the background that I planned to be bringing her the beginning of the thread. I wanted it to be as if she was chosen by nature to have the gift of sight. As I am looking more and more at it though, I am thinking about making the thread that the owl is holding a snake instead. I guess I haven't quite gotten over my snake obsession yet. Here she is with some background color:



I finally started to like her face and her general look. I am not really sure if she is still Clotho, maybe just an ambiguous woman being gifted by the Otherworld. I still feel for some reason there is more of me in her than normal.



This is the last photo I took of her. I have since added a delicate off the shoulder blouse on her. I hardly ever dress my girls so I thought I would play around with some fabric. I need lots of practice with fabric folds. I am excited about this one now, I wasn't at first. Funny how your work can evolve sometimes into more than you expected when the idea was first birthed.

Tiamat-finished

Well, at least I think I am done with her. I worked and worked on her, and changed elements on it over and over. I think I am fairly happy with how she turned out, but my self critic was out in full force with this one towards the end.

I wanted to go into some of the symbolism and my reasoning on this one. Tiamat is usually drawn as a three headed dragon, but I wanted to do this with my own impressions on the myth, and not rely on what I could read in Wikipedia. In the Sumerian myth the generation of creator gods that Tiamat is a part of is referred to as the "Ancient Ones". I believe that these Ancient Ones might have been another race, maybe like the Elven or an Elder race. A less fanciful idea is that they were a matriarchal people that were overtaken by a more warrior-like Patriarchal people. Again the passage that inspired the piece:
"Know that Tiamat seeks ever to rise to the stars, and when the upper is united with the lower, then a New Age will come to the Earth, and the Serpent shall be made whole again, and the waters will be as One."
I believe that this passage is talking a lot about humans having the ability to walk in both worlds, or uniting the spiritual and the material parts of ourselves. This is what we are all asked to do right now. I personally find it a very hard task. I seem to swing from one world to the next, and can not remain in both at once very often.
The stars represent the spiritual, and the lower world is our lower selves, or material selves. Tiamat seeks to rise to the stars, but is held down because the serpent is not one. I represent the serpent in this painting with a coral snake in an ouroboros style. The ouroboros is a well known symbol of the goddess energy. It's mouth represents it's positive active energy, and it's tail represents it's passive negative energy. When it bites it's own tail it is neutralized, it becomes the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I used a coral snake here because they are venomous. When it reaches it's tail it will be one, and neutralized. The masculine aggressive energy neutralized by the feminine.
There are many myths all over the world of an ancient race of wise people known as Serpents or Dragons. I believe this is why Tiamat was called a Dragon, she was part of these ancient wise people that possibly disappeared when the Patriarchal societies took over. Also, the ley lines that run under the earth are often referred to as Dragons. We must be able to converse with these Dragons under the ground and with the stars above to bring on the New Age. Many of those myths that talk about the ancient wise serpent people talk about them retreating underground, like in the myths of the Tuatha de Danann. So maybe they are or were physical beings that went "underground", or maybe they are the Dragon energy that runs through the arteries of our great Gaia. It is something I ponder a lot.
In the painting behind Tiamat's masculine side is a pair of ducks. Ducks represent an energy that lives in water, on land, and in the sky. They are showing us how to walk in both worlds. On her feminine side there is lost of plants and Earth energy. It is the energy of the Earth that helps us connect to the Feminine energy needed to neutralize our abundance of material energy.
Tiamat has three eyes instead of three heads here I suppose. The third eye of course is an Eastern symbol for obtaining inner vision and wisdom. The mist surrounding her represents the veil that surrounds us all and keeps us from seeing beyond the physical world. She is also rising up out of the ocean, or the unconscious. This is what the goddess has been doing for sometime now, rising out of the depths of our unconscious. Tiamat is one of the most ancient goddesses known. When she has fully risen out of our collective unconscious, a New Age will truly be upon us.

Tiamat WIP

I was totally struck by a quote from the ancient Sumerian myth and decided to paint Tiamat. She is the creatrix goddess of the Sumerian cylce. She is connected to serpents and dragons and was killed by her own grandson Marduk. Possibly this is another myth symbolizing the matriarchy being destroyed by the patriarchy, but like most ancient myth, the symbolism is multi-layered. Here is the quote that I couldn't get out of my head:
"Know that Tiamat seeks ever to rise to the stars, and when the upper is united with the lower, then a New Age will come to the Earth, and the Serpent shall be made whole again, and the waters will be as One."
I will go more into my interpretation of that when I have completed Tiamat, but for now I will just post my WIP pics. You will get to see how nuerotic I can be with my backgrounds with this progression.



The above image shows my graphite underdrawing. It is just a rough sketch and the painting usually morphs into something a little different looking than the sketch.



Here I have started to give her a little color and decided to go with black hair again.



More color added. I was thinking I wanted a drippy background here, but was really feeling unsatisfied with it. Basically, at this step, I had no idea what to do with the background. I like to paint the women sort of realistic with a lot of detail and make them the main focus. I like my backgrounds to be more abstract, but I never really know exactly how they will turn out. It is a lot of trial and error.



At this stage I decided to forget the drip, and go with a solid dark blue background.



At this stage I added some kind of circle thingys with drips. I am not sure really why except they look kind of cool. I will come up with some esoteric meaning later maybe. I do plan to paint yet another snake around her in an ouroboros style. I guess the circles will reflect that. I am feeling the power of this goddess and having a great time working on her. Hopefully I will have her done and posted by the end of this week.

Quetzalcoatl, WIP

I started a new painting this weekend and was progressing pretty quickly on her,and then got a cold today. I don't have a lot of energy to paint on her today so I thought I would post a WIP. She is a little bigger than my usual, 24x30, and I think I really like this size!

The first image is of my pencil sketch on the canvas. I do a pretty rough sketch just to know where everything is going to be. I was having a pretty hard time deciding where her back was going and if I should add butterflies or not. I erased a whole bunch at this stage.

Here she is with some color added. I have decided to change the way I had her orientated in the sketch and to get rid of the butterflies for now. I might add some at the end, but now I am thinking some kind of blackbirds flying in the distance added at the end.

Here is what she looks like right now. I have most of the elements painted in, and a whole lot of detailing to do and trying to de-sloppify some sloppy elements. I can be pretty impatient when I first start a painting. I want to get everything on the canvas quickly so I can get an idea of what it will look like. Then I go back and detail and fix my mistakes.
I am pretty happy with her so far. I know I am because I keep staring at her. Sometimes they just really captivate me, and that is when I know I am doing something right.
I am calling her Quetzalcoatl after the Mayan feathered serpent god. I will go into that more when I post the final painting. I am just really enjoying painting snakes lately. I also think the Slyvia Ji influence is even stronger in this work. I am just completely taken with her work. I know this painting has my own touch, but it is highly influenced by her amazing work.
Hopefully I will have this done within a week or two, but right now I think I just need to lay down. I worked at my daughter's preschool two days in a row last week, I am sure that is where I picked up this cold...dang it :)

New work and group show

I am almost done with a new painting. It really isn't extremely detailed, it just seems I haven't had a lot of time to work on it. I have been highly influenced by the work of Sylvia Ji lately. How can you not be inspired by her work? I think this latest piece shows some of her influence, but with my own touch of course. I should have it posted this week.
This weekend I will have a booth at Buster's bar for the Art in Motion Shakedown. It is Saturday from 7:30 until closing time. I will have one piece of art up for auction. You can read more about it here.
The weekend of May 22nd I have two exciting things to report. I will again be doing tarot readings and spirit guide drawings at the Inner Lights Festival in Lexington. I will also have two pieces, "Jezebel" and "Spirit of the West Wind" in a group show at Gallery 101 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I am very excited as I will be showing with many of my favorite artists from Red Bubble.

Here is the Press Release for the event:
"MASQUERADE": A Multi-Media Arts Event and Masquerade Ball!

Opening reception and "masked gathering"
SATURDAY MAY 22nd, 2010 From 7-10 PM

for those who may want to purchase a mask for this event, there will be a limited amount of masks available for sale at the door

Refreshments


This exhibit will include masks and other art works by artists responding to symbolic and concrete uses of masks related to carnival, ceremonial, spiritual, and other societal appearances of "masking". The exhibition will examine the mask as a wearable work of art, as a means of hiding or changing the identity of a person, as a protective device, literal and metaphoric meanings of"masking" in contemporary culture.

Historically, mask-makers have shown great resourcefulness in selecting and combining a wide array of materials. Artists in this exhibition also incorporate familiar and unexpected materials in their works.

Poetry by Mia Roman-Hernandez

A Special performance by Jean Minuchin from 8:30 pm till 8:45pm
BE SURE TO BE HERE FOR THIS VERY SPECIAL TREAT!!


EXHIBIT WILL INCLUDE WORKS BY THE FOLLOWING FEATURED ARTISTS;

Lily Fernandez, Adam White, Virginia Metayer, Elisabeta Hermann, Helene Ruiz, Sergio Cervantes,Lynnette Shelley, Mia Roman-Hernandez, kUrban, Janet Villasmil, Wahala Temi, Tammy Mae Moon, Patricia Ariel, Melissa Shawn Griffin, Jennifer Geiss, Damien Venditti, Rishona Cann, Judy Polstra, Jim Hammond, Jean Minuchin and Nadya of Dream Pieces and Outrageous Wear


this is a special event curated by Helene Ruiz, founder of The Urban Individualists in collaboration with Adam White, of The Gallery 101..this exhibit ends june 5th, 2010