Capricorn Season | Studio Notes

Studio Notes offer glimpses into my studio practice and creative process.

It’s dark out, and I’m wintering.

The previous year is being composted. Rot and ferment turn dirt to black soil, feeding the microbiome and storing nutrients for what will grow next. I’ve been dream-weaving the year ahead, flirting with the reality I want to create. This feels like the invitation of Capricorn season: the slow, steady work of making a vision tangible begins in the capacity to see and imagine it.

Capricorn’s emblem, the Sea-Goat, embodies this paradox. Straddling earth and water, it is at ease both in the climb toward great heights and in the descent into far-reaching depths. It finds its fullest expression when its mystical nature serves its material purpose, spiritualizing matter in the process. Capricorn is the birthplace of the Sun gods.

“A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

I’ve been working steadily in my studio, mostly drawing. My sun is in Capricorn, and I feel my best when I have a self-imposed mountain to climb, a goal or ambition to build toward—a new skill to learn, a painting to chip away at, a business to launch. I’ve come to accept strife as part of Capricorn’s texture, as is the lust for limitation and boundary, something to push against and transcend.

Capricorn is the great manifestor of the zodiac. The drive toward mastery is intrinsic to its nature, though it can easily distort into rigidity and control, which I’m often guilty of. Capricorn’s task is to master time and matter not by becoming their servant, but by becoming sovereign over them. Higher ground lends the goat perspective.

“The strength of Capricorn lies in its ability to endure. It knows that true transformation is a long process, and it is willing to walk the slow and steady road to wisdom.” — Dane Rudhyar

Time is a constant source of anxiety for me, and Capricorn teaches the mystery of time. Ruled by Saturn, Capricorn is associated with Chronos, Father Time, the devourer of his children. But we often forget that Capricorn is a feminine, earthy sign. Its deeper teaching is cyclical time. Chronos is also Crone, and the Crone reveals another way of relating to the passage of time.

Woman was the first clock, her body churning through cycles of fertility, gestation, birth, and death. The Crone knows that to master time is not to impose rigid structures of control, but to live in accordance with nature’s creative cycles.

So I’ve been thinking about cyclical living. About planning the coming year in attunement with seasons and lunations, achieving more by doing less, by aligning and harnessing with the creative force of nature rather than overriding it. I’m looking at the year as a whole, asking what I want to grow, and when it’s best to plant seeds. There are mountains ahead, but also fields to tend.

I find myself looking back at a Capricorn watercolour I painted a decade ago, when the Crone was so far off in the distance she didn’t even enter my field of awareness.

Examining the symbology I chose then is revealing. I was immersed in esoteric astrology and understood Capricorn’s ultimate aim as initiation and the transcendence of earthly forms in pursuit of spiritual attainment. Esoterically, Capricorn is the gateway of Spirit, the threshold of Christ consciousness born after nine months of gestation initiated in Aries. The Unicorn, a symbol of purity, one-pointed striving, and holy ascension, stands in contrast to the unruly, horny goat, long associated with fertility and the Devil.

In retrospect, I was mostly avoiding the parts I didn’t know how to deal with at the time. My body was an arid and cold place. I didn’t bleed for years. I didn’t fully understand that transcendence isn’t repression, but healthy integration and fertile composting.

Now I’m older, and ideas of spiritual purity annoy me, much in the same way reductive materialism does. I’ve made peace with the Devil, I am a child of Saturn after all. I surrender to the Great Mother. I can hear her triple-call. I have a renewed appreciation for the Sea Goat and for the horned gods who teach fertility in all its forms. My spirituality is entangled with flesh, sensuality, matter, time, and decay.

The lesson of Capricorn is this: time ripens what we care for. We reap what we sow; we get what we feed.

Art is a conversation between the conscious and the unconscious. In private lessons, you’ll explore your symbolic language while developing the technical skills to express it. My approach weaves foundational skills of classical realism with personal expression, allowing your work to carry the presence and resonance that’s truly yours.