Primordial Echo
22.75" x 21" Watercolor, Ink, Gouache, Acrylic and Graphite - August 2020 to June 2022
- I broke my left arm and right hand on August 11, 2020, right after starting this piece. So there was a long pause...Taking such a long break on this changed my ideas as it progressed. I was also reading about Jung and mandalas which altered my thoughts as well.
- Critically endangered crows - the Hawaiian Alala and the Guamanian Mariana Crow. The Alala is currently extinct in the wild, hard to imagine that crows could be pushed out of any ecosystem.
- Central black space with woven snakes and feathers at the bottom. The Chaos demon (Egyptian myth) weaves - makes me think of giant webs... living web or fabric. The whole piece reads like a web over a black hole to me now.
- Central deep grotto, dark hidden crystals. "The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek..."
- ...beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves. There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives. Joseph Campbell, Hero With a Thousand Faces.
- A journal entry about my local crows: "This morning I was out front and I heard what I thought was a hawk circling around a giant pine tree in my neighbor’s yard. I looked up and only saw a crow flying around and around, the sound was coming from him, not from a hawk. The call was a bit off, squeaky sort of, and thin, but the notes were all in the right places. A hawk flew in from the west and chased the crow away, it flew off making the shrill "squeak" that hawks make. The real hawk settled into a nest high up in the pine tree. I am assuming that the crow was attempting to trick the baby hawks into revealing their hiding spot."