The Elephant and The Mermaid Painting

Oil paint on canvas was used because of it’s organic character. The fact that oil paint dries slowly allows me to continue modelling and blending forms for several hours without the paint drying up. I used enamel gloss paint to produce wrinkles and to create the flowing white line that dances rhythmically around the forms. Oil paint can be manipulated and has a degree of depth in terms of color and texture that I do not find with any other medium. This myth came to me in a dream. The elephant approaches the mermaid who resembles that eternal icon of feminine beauty in the classical European sense, The Venus de Milo. The Venus-mermaid in this painting has ossified into alabaster or marble. Like the Venus de Milo her arms are missing. My Venus however has two tails, one of which sweeps downwards in a low curve while the other has metamorphosed into an arm-like form that reaches upwards. The hand or claw at the end of this arm consists of only two fingers or talons. In order not to intimidate or overwhelm her the elephant (symbol of the masculine principle) has magically shrunk to a size similar to that of the mermaid while the core of her femininity; her uterus has morphed into a conch shell which she holds precisely where her genitalia would, could or should be. She holds the conch there my means of the ghost of what once was, or perhaps still is, her left arm and hand. While the form and proportions of the head and torso are classically perfect and suggest youth, her skin in places is deeply wrinkled and she is injured (armless). There is male-female, beauty-ugliness, youth-agedness in a world consisting almost entirely of violet and orange shades only. Rudolf Steiner asserts that a preponderance of violet and orange (one of the so-called “Characteristic Combinations”) produces an atmosphere of tension: “something impending” or about to happen. In Steiner’s color circle orange is one step away from the “most powerful, most noble of all colors”: red, on the light, warm side while violet is one step removed from red on the dark, cool side of the spectrum. Neither quite achieve the state of nobility, grace, power that is synthesized and expressed by the color red. Hence, something impending.* The aim is to achieve not only this sense of tension and expectancy but also a profound mystery, harmony and beauty. The painting proclaims that contradictions, irony and paradoxes can be and indeed are - absorbed, incorporated, transcended, balanced and resolved. As with all myths, here the story is universally true and real. Giving visual expression to both the physical, the tangibly real and realities that exist primarily in what CG Jung calls the collective subconscious and unconscious and therefore hidden - this is surreality. My hope is that the painting will resonate with the viewer intuitively. Not merely on my terms, but in terms of his or her own personality, reality and imagination so that he or she can celebrate with me a deep appreciation of the mysterious and the exotic. In this sense, the imagination of the spectator-viewer is the place where the painting resides and is finally completed. *Note Steiner’s color theory is based on Goethe’s Theory of Colors, first published in 1810.

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:98.4 W x 59.1 H x 1.5 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.