This is a bit of a meader through my inner dialogue about this image I and painting. It started as an Instagram post. I though I share it here so I could add more to the ideas that are coming up around this.
Thoughts about this painting…. If Ba’al represents the regional God/diety of storms and rain and the God of the Bible represents all that created the world then it starts to separate and segregated the needs and access to divine intervention and relevancy in these relationships. We can look at it like weather and climate. Each in relation to the other.. So the storms of certain areas are a direct experience of those who live their and what drives that weather might not be anywhere near them. Shifts and changes would have consequences. And if your perspective was only channeled through the immediate circumstances then something like a climate would be mysterious and unimaginable.
If your people pray to the rain God and it doesn’t come then it could seem a failing to appease the diety. Then there would begin a recipe for taboos, rituals, and ultimately dysfunctional fall out of those things…. and conversely if all you knew was the bigger patterns of climate you might be disconnected from the traumas of weather and it conditions that affect people, places and things.
In this image I’m painting there is the simple chemistry of water and the sun. Two parts of what generates weather. The sun heats the surfaces of the planet creating convection and movement … wayer droplets rise into the sky and drift as clouds…. all this becomes the jet stream( I have radically simplified this process here because this is IG)…. as the droplets get heavier, temperature and such they fall to the earth…. for thousands of years people have give these phenomena names and called them Divine beings…
This painting start as just painting a goat and it has opened an box of connections, archetypes, and trying to bring together something ancient with the struggles we are facing today. I choose make this image feel like the alchemical manuals of the 17th century….that weird mix of God, and mysterious, curiosity, and to have that feeling of being a religious icon. As humans we has always clashed in these places…. and we are doing again. As these edges rub together and fray apart the fibers of beliefs and dogma then we might find away out of this.
Shaman @ Large 