Drawing & Painting

ART EVOKES THE MYSTERY WITHOUT WHICH THE WORLD WOULD NOT EXIST…

Rene Magritte

Cloaked Women

MYTHS ARE PUBLIC DREAMS, DREAMS ARE PRIVATE MYTHS.
― Joseph Campbell

The first cloaked woman I ever painted was an experiment in tempera resist and crayon etch. It’s where I first started playing with mixed media. I needed something fast to work with, a face with cloth around it came to mind but years later I was drawn back to the subject. I like focusing on the face, but there is an element that came to the surface later as I worked. It’s the whole “Green Man” myth. He was supposed to symbolize the cycle of life, death, and re-birth, represented in the cycle of growth each spring. He’s most commonly depicted as a face surrounded by, or made from, leaves.

I thought a woman was a much better choice for the symbol of the cycle of life, death and rebirth. The cloak is a symbol of the mysteries of those cycles. I’ve painted each in a different season and have plans to paint many more.

The Green Man is that spirit, energy, presence, inherent in every cell of the vegetative realm.

Mermaids

The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.

It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life.

Myths are the world’s dreams. They are archetypal dreams and deal with great human problems. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that then have to find expression in symbolic form.

A real artist is the one who has learned to recognize and to render… the ‘radiance’ of all things as an epiphany or showing forth of the truth.

― Joseph Campbell (1904 – 1987)
American mythology professor, writer, and lecturer best known for his work in the fields of comparative mythology and comparative religion.

The Murderous, Sometimes Sexy History of the Mermaid.

Fairies

MYTHS ARE PUBLIC DREAMS, DREAMS ARE PRIVATE MYTHS.
― Joseph Campbell

Elves

MYTHS ARE PUBLIC DREAMS, DREAMS ARE PRIVATE MYTHS.
― Joseph Campbell

Landscapes & Animals

MYTHS ARE PUBLIC DREAMS, DREAMS ARE PRIVATE MYTHS.
― Joseph Campbell

Both of these paintings were practice before painting one of the cloaked women. I had never painted snow or an autumn scene, this is where I worked out my color pallet.

Abstract

MYTHS ARE PUBLIC DREAMS, DREAMS ARE PRIVATE MYTHS.
― Joseph Campbell

Illustration

MYTHS ARE PUBLIC DREAMS, DREAMS ARE PRIVATE MYTHS.
― Joseph Campbell

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