Metanoia VII Painting

I've always enjoyed the idea of leading the viewers gaze on a journey around the canvas. I find there is an innate pleasure in the act of looking when your gaze is guided across the surface of an image. In much the same way as watching the current of a river, as it flows around rocks, into eddies and whirlpools. Sometimes slow and meandering, sometimes fast and fluid, but always moving and changing. This compositional device was often used by painters, sculptors and architects from the Baroque period, a style that's had a major influence on all my work. This visual technique helped lead the worshippers gaze around an alter or through the space of a cathedral, usually in an upward direction toward specific focal points depicting holy figures, Christian symbols or stained glass windows where light itself was harnessed as part of the overall composition. These spiralling floating forms, moving from dark into light, seem to transcend the very weight of the stone and wood from which the sculptures and ornate cornices were made. In this way the artists helped reveal the divine energy suffused within these earthly materials. 'Metanoia VII', the latest painting in my Metanoia series, very much explores this form of fluid composition and visual dichotomy. Metanoia was a word used by psychoanalyst Carl Jung to indicate the spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form. This process of mental alchemy is described throughout my 'Metanoia' series by structures that fall apart and reform, dark giving way to light, earth into air, solid into liquid, figurative imagery melting into abstraction and vice versa. Visual transformations that capture the turbulent moment of change between one state and the next.