Studio Notes offer glimpses into my studio practice and creative process. Here, I share about that uncanny feeling when a painting comes alive, and the strange power of images.
That uncanny moment when something peers back at you from beyond the canvas. Oh, hello there, nice to finally meet you.
I’ve been working with her image since the dead of winter, during Capricorn season. She started as a sketch, an exploration of the Crone, something I’m contemplating more and more as I find myself aging in a culture that loves reminding us how gross aging women are. To botox or not to botox (surely, not). Oh, Horned-Mother, guardian of thresholds, midwife to the Mystery of womb and tomb, you who teach fertility in all its forms—you have no time for this bullshit.
Maybe this painting is an invocation.
I’ve often written about how the creative impulse is essentially a drive towards wholeness. The recurring archetypes, symbols, and images that surface in our work hint at parts of the self seeking integration. This is a psychologized view of creativity, a more tolerable entry point, one that keeps the door to magic slightly open without yet invoking the enspirited Otherworld, this discrediting realm of non-human intelligences and weird encounters. But obviously, this painting is not just about the Crone. It’s also about the Witch. And so here, I must straddle both views: the psychological, which sees these recurring images as disowned parts seeking expression, and the animist, which takes seriously the possibility that they have a life of their own.
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Witchcraft implies craft, and it also implies spirit work. Be it medicine, fetishes, or talismans, the witch makes things with her hands and in doing so enlists a wild variety of spirits towards her desired working—ancestral, land-based, planetary, etc. Through her craft, she reifies their abstract, invisible existence and gives them a body. She makes the unseen tangible, the immaterial incarnate, which is not so different from what artists do. In my painting, I’m especially fond of the horned-crone’s hands—crooked hands, hands that have meddled with creative forces. She holds a skull (Nature’s original spirit vessel) and is grounded in the power that comes with standing aware and embodied at the crossroads between worlds.
As a figurative artist drawn to the body and the face, I am fascinated by that moment when the painting appears to wake up and come alive as if a new entity is born out of my focused attention and flow state. I will explore the deeper parallels between art and the crafting of spirit-vessels in a future instalment of A Magical Theory of Art, my series on the intersection between creativity and magic, but for now, I’ll just say that something palpable changes in a painting when it crosses into that felt sense of Presence.
When you spend so much time with an image (I must be tallying over fifty hours with this painting by now), it tends to come alive in the psyche like a rogue phantasm. From a psychological angle, working with a chosen symbol or image generates its own field, enabling the psyche to restructure itself around it. We can direct the shaping of the psyche by feeding it a desired image and giving it our sustained attention. From an animistic perspective, painting a chosen image is a devotional act that builds resonance with the spiritual force it represents, thus establishing a bond.
Images have a strange power. What we feed feeds us in return, setting into motion a self-perpetuating feedback loop. Our Instagram feeds (what a fitting term) work much the same way, shaping us in the image of whatever holds our attention, whether we are conscious of it or not. My feed lately has been full of face yoga, guasha routines, and infrared masks—the overculture’s answer to aging gracefully. I get this content because I engage with it, and as a result, I perpetuate this anxious compulsion to continually manage my face. It’s ok. Aging is an initiation we all have to go through. To embrace the Crone in this day and age is a transgressive act. And still, I must.
I share all of this and the painting is not even finished yet. But the conjuring is on. I call forth the Crone, the Witch, the Hag. Wild one, wise one. She who looks at death straight in the eye, never alone, with hordes of ghosts and spirits at her back.
She looks at me with a knowing gaze.
If my art and writing resonate with you, you can support my practice by purchasing a print or becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you for helping me bring more of this work into the world.
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