It's in the Stars

Our years of part-time living at Cloudburst, our property north of Squamish, finally brought together for me a plan for a series of paintings incorporating several of my long-term interests:--calligraphy, botanical illustration, and the symbol system of Western astrology. In 2007, I began to work on "Astrological Plants of the Squamish Valley." So far, I've completed Cancer, Leo, Gemini, and Virgo. Taurus is on the easel now. Maybe, just maybe, I'll finish the twelve zodiacal signs this year.

At the very least, the final product will be a great achievement in making order out of chaos, or at least complexity -- somewhat like the work I used to be paid to do??!!?

Here's how I play my game: The personality traits assigned to the 12 signs of the zodiac are widely known, but less well known is the assignment of almost anything you can name to a particular sign or its ruling planet: physical characteristics, occupations, geographic locations, and -- relevant to my series -- colours, metals and plants. With Gemini (my own sign), the painting incorporates the colours of its ruling sign Mercury, the image of a local plant that matches the traditional Mercury flora (a somewhat subjective assignment on my part-- but how could Black Twinberry be anything but Gemini's?), the Latin and common names for the plant, the glyphs (symbols) for Gemini and Mercury, and the sign's traditional image, The Twins. Virgo, the second image shown here, is also ruled by Mercury so I've played differently with Mercury's colours, which are blue, violet, slate, soft browns, and spotted, plaid and checked patterns.

But wait. There's more. Astrological lore assigns each sign to one of four elements -- earth, air, water, fire -- and so I decided to indicate these, using traditional symbols from alchemy:-- Air and fire are upward pointing triangles (air's with a midline); earth and water are downward pointing triangles (earth's with a midline). Thinking along these lines, though, I began to feel that astrology and alchemy perhaps represent a male worldview and that my series ought also to represent the feminine principle. Or maybe this rationale was just an excuse to do something, finally, with the images in a marvellous book I happened upon years ago -- Marija Gimbutas' THE LANGUAGE OF THE GODDESS.

Marija Gimbutas was a Lithuanian-American archaeologist who was the first to propose that the distinctive patterns on Neolithic pottery and monuments represented aspects of traditional goddess worship -- and the basis of long-standing matriarchal cultures all across Europe. Her book provides lavish documentation of these marks and patterns and suggests their relationships to aspects of the Goddess:-- fertilizing, energizing, regenerating, life-giving, etc., from which I selected likely correspondences with the four elements. Finally, I've added local "fauna" for each of the elements: Bee (fire), snake (earth), snail (water), butterfly (air).

It's quite an extravaganza, as you can see, about which one might ask some questions. The first: Why? Answer: Just because I feel like doing it. The second: Are these what you'd really call paintings? Answer: To be considered at a later date.