Painting progress

Kelp forests and golden boughs

Last week we were down south a bit close to Monterey Bay as my husband, Michael was teaching a retreat, so I thought I would drive the extra bit along the coast to take Hawk to the Aquarium. The image below sums up how excited he was the entire time. His first word was “fish” when we were in Japan and he was utterly in love with the koi at our hotel. And his love for all things undersea is just as intense still. When we first walked in he started running from one tank to the next yelling “WOW!” at the top of his lungs at each one. It was all a lot for a little guy to handle and I think he lasted about 7 minutes in the car on the way back before passing out.

I wanted to share progress on the piece I am working on that will premier in next month’s art exhibition featuring the Visionary Muse Collective (of which I am a member) opening May 18th. There is a lot to say about what this piece means to me and what is going on here, which I will devote an entire post to once it is finished, but for now, this piece captures a moment between a Mermama and Merbaby as they snuggle up for the night wrapped in seaweed, just like otters. This is the last stage of the underpainting of the Mische Technique, the primary technique I paint in and teach. As you can see, it creates this stunning opalescent underpainting that you kiss with color and voila! Your painting is complete. (I really wish it was that simple).

Just like the otters that live in the waters off the coast of Monterey Bay, in fact, wrapped in the same seaweed as in the painting - Giant Kelp. Kelp forests are an incredible oasis of biodiversity and a large portion of the Aquarium is devoted to sharing its glory to the land-dwelling world. Walking in, this is one of the first things you see. It’s a three-story tall tank mimicking the actual ocean environment whose waves pound the shore just outside. It’s difficult to see what’s happening here but I’ll try to paint the picture.

While my child was wildly squealing and pointing at all of the fish and running around in excited circles, I noticed that towards the surface, the little fish were spiraling in a slow and steady rhythm. There was something about it that utterly captivated me. The image above is actually from the third story viewing area and the image below is from the ground looking up.

I mentioned in a previous post that I have been voraciously reading some major tomes, starting with Richard Tarnas’ Cosmos and Psyche, then diving into the bite-sized palette cleanser The Flip by Jeffrey Kripal (which I literally cannot recommend enough, everyone must read this right now) and now starting the unparalleled classic, James George Frazer’s, The Golden Bough. If your jaw hasn’t dropped to the floor at this last title then let me explain what this book is. It’s an urtext for mythological studies and its publication influenced, putting it lightly, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and James Hillman to name a few. The version I am reading is about 800 pages long (it was published in 2 books and then was split into 12 because of its length later on). Published originally in 1890, Frazer seeks to answer the question of what exactly is going on in the idea of regicide (ritual king killing) in relation to the cult of Diana at Nemi in Greece. But like a modern-day recipe blog, he then circumambulates the entire thing by starting off like, “well, to answer that we must first identify what magic is and how it is different than religion by giving you 200 pages of examples before we even start to get to the point,” (I’m not gonna lie, it functions rather like a grimoire and I definitely took some notes).

Just like with any urtext, reading the source of so much information that is downstream from something is truly revelatory. It fills out gaps you never even knew were there. It’s like reading Plato’s Timaeus and having the entire Western magical tradition fall into place or like the time I read the Bible many years ago and suddenly understood what all of the fuss was about geopolitically. I have been studying and reading Campbell, Jung, and all of their offshoots for so many years now that reading this book is just blowing my mind. It’s not that he is saying anything new. It’s more that how he is writing about it is just far enough removed from our modern post-modern sensibilities that the organization of information is completely different and in that difference, new ideas are highlighted. For one, he defines Magic and Religion in different ways that we do today colloquially. Magic enjoys a much much broader scope nowadays and his definition of religion bleeds heavily into what we would just file happily under the Magic umbrella. But grouping things the way he does is also really interesting to reflect upon as boundaries shift and change in how we think.

This was all in my head while standing there in the Aquarium watching these fish swim in this mesmerizing mystical spiral. It was probably because of the mood I was in, but it was like watching the breath of the ocean itself, scintillating silver scales breathing the very cycle of life in microcosm, echoing the vast cosmic pinwheel arms of the very galaxy in which we find ourselves, our little planet a silver fish in a vast universal ocean.

And here’s a sneak peek at color.

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Here is this week’s video which is a quick egg tempera recipe for use in the Mische Technique.

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And I am working on another piece for a show coming up in June at Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco. It’s their annual portrait show and the theme is Mythology, right up my alley. Here’s a bit about the piece:

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