Venus (Sourcerer) Painting

This painting of the planet Venus is inspired by my work on empathy and gender. It reflects the human struggle with opposites: light and dark, male and female, hot and cold, and resolves these as an intertwining. It can also be seen as a mandala for meditation. 2 May 2017. I showed my painting of Venus at Brighton University. The first question I was asked was why isn't she blue? Well, Venus isn't blue, as you can tell from looking into the night sky most nights of the year where she can be seen as the brightest star: at dusk, the Evening Star, the first to emerge from behind the brilliance of the sun, and then, traversing the sky, the Morning Star, the last to be dimmed by his reawakening. She is yellow-gold. I know, I too was brought up thinking Mars is red and Venus is blue, as Mars is the god of war, and Venus the god of love. But she is yellow gold when viewed by the naked eye. Apparently, the legend of blue Venus is due to filters used in the first photos of Venus. Venus is also covered in clouds of sulphuric acid, so you cant see her face. But recent satellite photography has been able to penetrate this veil, and digital images of Venus have now been published. She is a hot planet, around 450ºC at the surface, and basically a seething mass of volcanoes and molten lava rivers, erupting, flowing, cooling and sinking again into the molten core of planet. When I first saw this digital satellite image of Venus, I wanted to paint her. I had been wrestling my themes of empathy and violence; my response to the political problems of the world (why cant we just love each other), and was struggling with literal representations of this struggle: paintings of machine guns reducing tribesmen to red and white splashes (Maxim Machine Gun), video of emotional abuse symbolised by flagellation with red paint (Love and Hate). The lava flows on Venus have been rendered in the satellite images as a mingling of red and white, sometimes abrupt, sometimes smooth. The painting of it, around 60 hours of layers, provided me with plenty of time to meditate on the mingling of the red and white, which symbolises blood and semen, feminine and masculine, war and surrender. I used mineral pigments - Venetian Red, Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Yellow, Ultramarine, Titanium Dioxide. The second question I was asked was why the two titles? Well actually, my rendition of Venus has four aspects, depending on which way up you hang the canvas. Many symbolic motifs emerge from the patterns in the painting. The four secondary names I have chosen for Venus are: Sourcerer, Owl (wisdom), Tree, Ancestor.

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:24 W x 24 H x 1.6 D in

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