I began this painting over a decade ago as a gift for somebody who had changed my life. And then the situation imploded. The implosion had been coming, like a not-silent comet, for a long time. What I had thought I wanted I didn’t. And then I had no choice in the matter. It was, as these things go, all for the best. I finally finished the painting this past year.
‘Sunshine of the Black Bull‘ – 2011 & 2023, acrylic on canvas, 30″ X 22.”
In my computer floating freely I found a digital file of (shall we say) cartoonish ‘Druid-monk’ images. He’s working beneath a light bulb (of course) and creating an icon of spirals. One is a cauldron-spiral. Perhaps I was thinking of manuscript illumination.
Then I found an ink drawing/collage from my (rather dark) 2011 exhibition at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts in Toronto.
After combining them in Photoshop I was going to call the series ‘Temptation at the Manuscript Factory’ – humour inspired by a miniature I’d created many moons ago for an art gallery and gallery owner (both gone) who annually held an International Exhibition of Miniature Art. Instead I worked with a line from my unpublished poem Celtlandia Has Fallen.
Celtlandia Has Fallen is a sort of a quest poem, inspired by ancestral yearnings. There is something in the DNA stirring. In the Continuous Vegetal Style I served her. I don’t remember this, but in the poem ‘I’ do.
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