Rainbow Body
One becoming two
I painted a mirror-gazing self-portrait each month of my pregnancy with our son. It was a raw process, done when I was dizzy, bloated, elated, confident, on top of the world and would have rather have been on the couch. Each of the self-portraits captures the mood I was in while I was painting them.
At 5 months pregnant
I left each one transparent so that each portrait contained a memory of the passed to visually capture the passage of time. As my belly grew, the layers of the portraits became almost like a stop-motion image, leading me to the inevitable end of this journey and the beginning of another.
At 7 months pregnant
Once my son was born, I finished the rest of the painting. I added in a portrait of him when he was just three weeks old. The planets are in the Chaldean order, the order it was believed by the ancients that the soul descended from the fixed stars down to Earth, accruing influence from each of the planetary spheres along the way. That order from top to bottom is Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. The Soul would take on a layer of materiality from each one which would essentially make up a person’s birth chart, the moment where all of the planets are located the moment they are born.
Whole process of Rainbow Body from start to finish
The hawk flying up towards my baby is his namesake, Hawk, the spiritual force joined with the material to animate life. Hawk is pictured in a 24kt gold star. One of my favorite scientific facts is that we are indeed made of star-stuff. We are in essence made from the cosmos. It is one of the things I hope to instill in him so that he may draw upon that knowledge for the rest of his life.
Completed Rainbow Body.
This hangs in our main living space and Hawk loves looking at it. He has been Moon obsessed since he was only a few months old and spotting the Moon in this painting is a favorite activity. He now identifies Jupiter and Saturn as well. We tell him the story of his birth as told by this painting and he really loves to hear it. It’s his own mythic origin story.
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