At sixes and sevens

I WONDER IF you remember that I was making a series of paintings of the seven chakras as icon-like characters painted on Ikea breadboards? Well the last of the seven was completed recently and as I go to tell you about it I realise that I never showed you the sixth. So here we are, at sixes and sevens.

The whole series was to be painted over some time so that development and change showed in my work. Each image is that particular chakra personified, astride an associated animal, set against a background of appropriate colour and holding an apt symbolic item. Each time the figure alternated between male and female, and with the progression of seven they aged. The characters all point to the appropriate chakra point on their body and the horizon line crosses behind them there too.

So here we have indigo Ajna .. the sixth chakra, a wise white haired owl-riding woman holding a crystal ball of magic mushrooms. This point on the body is the third eye, and it symbolizes far-seeing, intuition, psychic perception, imagination, dream interpretation, luminescence.
Here are snippets of the painting in progress...


And here she is as a finished piece:


There is an incredibly intricate iconography surrounding this spiritual system, involving sounds, minerals, planets, psychological states and demons, as well as animals, colours and so on...
I have based the colours of this sixth icon a little on those that can be found deep inside the feldspar minerals like labradorite (also linked with third-eye things). I was given a beautiful piece of this (right) on a necklace by my grandmother when I was younger and remember being happy to look inside it at the beautiful refracted colours for hours. Almost as if the northern lights had been bottled.



And so from indigo to violet. From watery mineral to gold. For the final piece in this series, Sahasrara, I thought about how this ultimate breadboard icon should differ from the previous six, standing, as it does, for a kind of enlightenment, wisdom and understanding. I decided this figure should be ageless, sexless, facing forward unlike the others, and crowned in gold like an iconic saint. Our seventh character also is seated this time, not on an animal, but a winged chair, and holds the very same painting of which they are part. Perhaps a sort of self-awareness, or weird ever-diminishing quantum realization?


I am particularly pleased with the golden halo, made with gold wax over layers of oil paint. The nimbus or aureole was used widely in both western and eastern religious art to denote sanctity. Here I have connected it with the crown chakra and its associated enlightenment.



And so with the seven completed, I await eagerly a photograph of them all together on Bob's wall. I have always considered the icon amongst the most beautiful of all arts, and so was delighted that to follow on from this series, Bob has commissioned me to paint an iconic triptych. The details and story of which shall have to wait some long while until I have the time to uncover them at length.

A mountain song for my wordless son

I HAVE PAINTED a new painting, four inches tall this time, and containing the most bent of bodies I have yet portrayed: A mountain song for my wordless son. It is made on the slice of wood that lay directly up the branch from the slice on which the blackberry wedding pendant was painted.
I cannot explain what it is about, see in it what you see...


There was a sitting-up-til-midnight to finish all the Telling the Bees artwork, which is now swimming amid the cogs at the printing mill. It is always lovely to make a work for myself after working on a work for somebody else. But I've started to go cross-eyed with these ever diminishing paintings, and get cross with the tiny hairs of the paintbrush that at this minuscule level seem like tree trunks to a beetle. The next painting will be bigger!

*POST SCRIPT* Prints available here.

Seven Paintings

I HAVE BEEN ASKED TO PAINT seven paintings ... seven characters representing the seven chakras in each of the seven colours.
Chakra is a Sanskrit term meaning circle or wheel and describes a system that is used in many belief systems. Each chakra point is a place in the body and represents also a spiritual aspect. Taken together the seven chakras describe a flow of energy and a development within.


If you were to look for imagery of the chakras you would most likely find swathes of rainbows and swirling misty colourful evanescences. I chose instead to paint seven interesting and strange characters, in broken oil paint on wooden breadboards. This commission will take time and I will work one by one through the seven from tailbone to the top of my head. In each painting I will include a horizon which crosses the body at the chakra point and an animal associated with the chakra's spiritual aspect. In each painting a colour will dominate, but quietly. I hope that when hung together on their owner's wall, they will look like a series of old icons, strange and perhaps mystical in a very different sense from many other visual representations of old eastern belief systems.