Sinope

First, a disclaimer. no, not the nudity, I make no excuses for that - and besides you'd need some mighty big fig leaves, the original of this painting is larger than life. But this is a sepia version of the original, which you can find elsewhere on this blog, if you are interested. I like the combination of computer manipulation and very old school painting on canvas, which I stretch myself - in some ways the most enjoyable part of the process, physically hard work, preparing the surface, getting a feel for the actual size, upscaling and recomposing preliminary sketches. Then the painting begins. No matter how many sketches I have done, there is something daunting about the large white canvas. It really is blank. And I am not painting by numbers. All the abstract ideas which feed into the image, all come flooding through at this moment and with the best will in the world, I never stick to the original design. Virgin territory. Especially with this one. It began as a response to my catholic upbringing. The omnipresent Virgin Mary. Role model, mother figure, so we girls were told. But I could never make those saccharine images fit with anything I expected of my gender. She was clearly someone else's construct. I didn't write the figure of Mary off completely - after all, if you believe her story, she is quite a woman. But I wanted to paint her the way I saw her. Everybody knows about the Marian myth's pre-christian origins, Isis, Ishtar and so on. I stress the word myth to distinguish the historical ficure from the legends she inspired. As I began painting, I soon had to concede that the Marian thing was not going to hold. The image emerging, was something, someone else. I even tried painting in a blue bird, hinting at the annunciation, which is such a favourite marian moment for painters. But no. She was emphatically not Mary. I sat in my studio, brush in hand, staring at this emanation. I listened to music from the Bahia region of Brasil and danced around. It was all turning rather pagan, or shamanic if you like. I had created this image who now loomed large in my studio. Who was she? Where did she come from? and what was she saying? At the time I had begun working on a poem which I called the Song of Sinope. Sinope is a place on the black sea, part of the last bastion of the Byzantine Empire. It is also the name of a woman in Greek mythology who is the daughter of the river god Asopus. Her name is also given to the red earth which has been used by painters since images appeared in caves. And one of Jupiter's moons bears the name of Sinope. So I was working to bring all these strains together and out of it came some of the first verses of what sounded like a song from the earth. Yes, can't quite escape Mahler, who of course wrote Das Lied von der Erde based on old Chinese poems. I began to think that this painting was visually related to those ideas, so I gave her the name Gaia. But really, she should probably be known as Sinope. I have yet to finish her song, and fully understand what she is about. Meanwhile, there she is, a rather commanding presence.