Like this:

Xyante and I are in a fearful time of transition, waiting for our house to sell before we can move on to our next home. After going through so many underworld transits in the last ten years, there is something different about this one. Mythically, there is something about Limbo that is worse than Hell.

For ten years, we’ve invested our identity in our home near the ocean. That’s not the problem, we’ve moved on in intention to the next, which will be in the Sonoran desert. We put a powerful effort into the sweat equity, we’ve done ceremony to thank the house and bless it for the next people who will live in it, and moved out. But not on. No one can quite understand why the house, in such an amazing location, has not sold yet. That’s another, bigger story, in a chain of stories in this huge time of transition for so many. Meanwhile, for us, everything is on hold, and we feel powerless. The waiting is hideous. There is plenty of time for every fearful fantasy of what could go badly wrong to wrench our guts. Even after all we’ve been through and not merely survived but found a way to flourish afterward, the fear is here. What, oh what is this all about?

We’re lucky, wonderful, generous friends have gifted us the use of an art studio where we can live in another beautiful town down the coast. Funny, though we’ve been given such a gift, it’s hard to use it without being distracted and drained by doubt and fear. But since I can’t think of anything else to do, I’ve been making art as if my life depended on it.

I’ve made a series of paintings, 10 in the last six or eight weeks. I’ve been going as fast as I can. These paintings incorporate collage — glued-on images — so I don’t have to slow down much to render. I can just paint and slap things on, paint some more and move on to the next. I’m trying to keep moving, not to get caught in judgment on the work, just doing it. Sometimes a pause comes, of a day or days, when I have to let the art-energy well up again. At the same time, I can’t let it be stalled entirely. So, I simply start something, waiting for some kind of inspiration I can follow.

Now, I have enough paintings stacked up (literally – they are on paper and piled on the studio table) that I can see some connections. I embarked on these hoping they would speak to me, and they have, a bit. Still, I can feel judgment creeping in. Pretty. Facile. Lightweight. All the deadly words.

The last few days have been building into one of those fear-storms, where I feel myself getting wound increasingly tightly, air squeezing out. Not as dramatic as a panic-attack, thankfully. But bad, seeing every way we can fail and all the most dire possible consequences, playing out endlessly in my overworked imagination. So I picked up a painting I had started and tried to work, as I had for the previous few days. I had an image I wanted to use for Hephaistos. About time my tutor-god made an appearance. I was musing about our encounters with Hephaistos’s steel, on the dark street in Atlanta, our right hands cut open, Xyante on the operating table exactly two years later. We survived. But what, oh what is this all about, wounded god?

Composition helps (yes, all right, pretty, I know, but I can’t help it. I compose elegantly, all right? So sue me. Want to make something of it? Want to step outside right now and settle it? Huh?)

I wanted two or three faces: Hephaistos, a golden robot girl, one of the artificial forge assistants he created for himself, and Pandora, the first woman, created from clay. I found the images I wanted, but three overwhelmed the composition, too much. So, Hephaistos and Maria, the robot-woman from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Every robot is Hephaistean, a made creature with its own intelligence and archetypal power, an expression of the gods who inspire us to make things on Earth. The two heads went onto a fiery background, like the fire-god’s lava, like forge-fire. I wanted this image dark, to put there my dark feelings and the pain that is visiting. The space between the heads asked for something. I’ve been working with cups, in the Tarot the symbol of emotions, of love. These cups would be forged in Hephaistos’ fire, filled with wounding, surging with blood and molten iron.

Both heads would be golden, Hephaistos’s dark and ominous, Maria’s brighter, the cups suspended between them. Xyante looked at that moment and said how Maria’s face looked like the moon to him. So I made her silvery-white instead, which called for a pale, transparent, shimmering blue around her, which I glazed over the yellow, orange and black to cool the fire. I knifed on white gesso between the cups, to set a ground on which to paint the blood and iron. But then, the painting was suddenly finished. The white streams became a flood of cosmic energy, its meeting place a newborn galaxy.

Only one other painting in this series startled me as much. A painting of Athena. That too started with a field of lava, then burgeoning clouds and warm milky light around the goddess. I tried to make it many other things, but the clouds wanted precedence, and form a pale, golden background that brightly silhouettes Nike, the goddess of Victory, held in the palm of Athena, the goddess of war, strategy, weaving, wisdom, the sister of Hephaistos.

Xyante and I lay in bed just at dawn this morning, talking about our fear. Usually, only one of us is afflicted at any given time. Not so now. We talked about the paintings. Like everything else, each of our work seems somehow to belong to the other as well, and we can sometimes read our joined fate in the art we create. Between us we wove a mythic net, a new story. These two paintings are about creation, about what we will create: literally, a new life on new land. The fires are still bright, the alchemy still in progress. The land of our new life is just being formed, too hot to tread. Soon enough, we will be able to walk on it and start fresh. The gods are with us.

© 2010 daedala. Click to explore larger images.

Advertisement