Mary/ Meriam Painting

Meriam, 175 X 145 cm. Acrylic on Canvas. After a strange experience of a "time slip" while snorkeling at Mesudiye, near Datça, when after a long swim out to the tip of the peninsula where I was sure there had once been a temple (The Ancient Greek city of Knidos was nearby, and the peninsula was a perfect site as I know from many journeys to these sites in Turkey and Greece) and sensing the intense magnetic pull of the deep blue underwater, so beautiful and attractive, calling to me to come into it, time seemed to split into an ancient and a modern layer, superimposed on each other. I found myself alarmed because I could no longer tell if what I saw actually existed now or not...I saw ancient Greek and Phoenician inscriptions on the sea bed stones, caves with underwater temples, and felt a powerful inner temptation to remain there...the water dropped down into blackness beyond the peninsula, and faced with a decision to become lost in these hallucinations (?) or not I decided I must return to my loved ones immediately, and that otherwise my exhaustion (long swim) could have fatal results...I stayed in this state for two days. The next day with Ba'itha we swam out...straight into the sea, much further than usual, and again I felt "this is unusual, dangerous". Oddly as I remember that same day or the next at about that time there occured at Bitez, not so far away from us the mysterious death by drowning of a close friend at while canoeing far out to sea (not dressed for swimming) and many dreams followed associated with this, of our friend. Seeking resolution, through dreams and feeling, I began to work on this painting on our return a couple of days later in Istanbul, (on the way back going to our friends funeral). As I worked on this deep blue, evoking the magnetic attraction of the blueness, like a vertical view down into the water, a pervasive sense of the presence of the Virgin Mary, Star of the Sea, began to arise, her silhouette appearing many times in the painting, as in a developing photograph. From my time in the company of Bulent Rauf, Turkish translator of Ibn 'Arabi's "Fusus al-Hikam" into English, and "consultant" to the Beshara School of İntensive Esoteric Education until his mercification in September 1987, I knew that he saw (quite possibly actually, visually) Mary as a blue matrix of light, a "blueprint of everything living". With the appearance of Mary a kind of catharsis of these disturbing events began to occur, a healing "wind from nowhere". I hope that people can understand that these experiences are not unusual in painting, and are part of a living creative process and resolution. I do not attempt to "fix" these events or give them overdue importance, or turn them into "things"- to do so would be extremely dangerous, the fluidity of these perceptions becomes distorted once the mind manages to "fix" them, out of "flowingness", becoming obsessive and possessed by the ego, leading into delusions. Perhaps I have given a glimpse into an underlying visionary experience with real effects in the world, acting through multiple "times" where future and past and present are just labels, with little meaning in themselves, informing each other across/ through time. This painting "grew by itself". There was little "intent" on my part...more a sense of being haunted, like that sense I have at the ancient Anatolian city (8,000 years?) of Catal Hüyük...that many people of that time are speaking to me, communicating, pleased to find at last someone listening to them, hearing them, recognising them and their shamanic life...across the seas of "time". There is a sense that the bridge is simple humanity, deep care, kindness...that we share in. As to "Meriam", in Jungian Psychoanalysis the Sea (and our annual "holiday" (holy day) visits to it) is the "Great Mother", "The Collective Unconscious". The literal matrix ...

Painting:Acrylic on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:57.1 W x 68.9 H x 1.6 D in

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