Water Goddess :: A deeper message revealing itself

I started a new collection at the beginning of the year {not entirely sure how it's suddenly May}, and with one thing and another it's been a slower process than I anticipated.

 It started with only a title - Water Goddess - and an idea - to go back to my roots and reintroduce the figure.

As the paintings unfold, it's become increasingly clear that there's a deeper story emerging, one that surprised me at first, but makes total sense, and is a beatuiful reminder of our place in the world.

Sea swimming has always been about full sensory immersion for me - it's one of the best ways I know to ‘be here now’. Cold water forces you to ‘come to your senses’ in the best way.

I have always loved, too, the feeling it gives me of being part of something. It's not a feeling I've been able to enjoy much in my life, for all sorts of reasons, but the sea has always made me feel at home, and a part of something in both a universal and very intimate way.

As these paintings have been coming to life, I've noticed that the figure, while present, has wanted to remain ambiguous. A transparent hand holding a frond of seaweed; a hint of shoulder; legs dissolving into the patterns of light on the water. You might not even know they're there at first glance.

That wasn't a conscious intention, but it feels true to say that these paintings are about not just being in the water, but also being part of the world, in a way that humans as a species seem to have forgotten.

I'm not really one for grand or activist statements in my work, but in a quiet way, these paintings reveal perhaps the place we humans are meant to have in the world.

Not dominating, not desecrating, not ravaging, not even in charge; but part of, welcomed into, and with the silent acknowledgement that we are not the subject. 

It is a privilege to be here, to get to immerse in the natural world - our home, because we too are nature.

I'm still finding language for this. More nuances will likely be revealed.

For now, I'm enjoying getting to be ‘part of’ the evolution of these paintings, as they show me both where I belong - my place in the order of things - and where I am not as important as I might fall into believing. There's relief and comfort in that.

I was listening to Alan Watts on a podcast the other day, and he said this, which seemed to speak to what I’ve been feeling {and also to my love of ancient Chinese brush painting}:

In Chinese painting, man is always seen as in nature, rather than dominating it. You get a painting entitled, Poet Drinking by Moonlight, and you see a great landscape, and after some search with a magnifying glass at last you see the poet, stuck away in a corner somewhere, drinking wine. Whereas, if we painted the subject Poet Drinking by Moonlight, the poet would be the most obvious thing in the picture. There he would be, dominating the whole thing, and the landscape off somewhere behind him. … The Taoist inspired painters, the Zen inspired painters, have this view of man as an integral part of nature. Something in it, just as everything else is in it - flowers, and birds, and not… sent into this world… to farm it, dominate it. “

~ Alan Watts