oil with black lava medium paste, 30”X30”
After visiting Portland’s Audubon Society and meeting a wounded resident bird, Jack Sparrowhawk, an American Kestrel, I was inspired to start a new painting featuring this majestic orange and blue falcon in flight. Shortly there after, I was called to travel to attend the headstone unveiling ceremony, for my dear departed nephew, Sean.
“The Unveiling” chronicles the vestiges of a journey, in which I experienced a wave of synchronistic moments that seemed precognitive of the imagery within my painting and echoed the threshold event of my nephew’s ceremony.
The painting’s composition is window-like. It frames a sequence of circumstances and tells a story of a liminal space where creation and death meet and are unveiled.
There are numerous cryptic pictographs used in the painting, including a thickly painted magic symbolic seal, smeared across the sky, to represent the archangel of annunciation, Gabriel. A Chinese character representing Dragon is inscribed on the black-lava flecked epitaph, in the foreground. A dove-like presence watches, hovering and touching an astral stream below, as an American Kestrel illuminated, rises in flight from the headstone.
Art Inspiration on my studio wall: The Angel Ruh Holding The Celestial Spheres, Persian Miniature Painting, circa 1550-1600,