Mother Deer.

You can’t really tell yet, but that’s Elen I’m painting, the lost pagan horned goddess of British folklore.
She’s Mama deer, spiritual consort, Shamanic pathfinder of ley lines and a divine fertility being.

That’s quite a bad ass resume, except to say that like most Pagan figures, it wasn’t enough for her Christian brethren, who gave her a historical make over and renamed her St Helena.

Still, her new turn as a latter day Lara Croft, seeker of relics such as the Holy Sepulcher and Christs Cross is fascinating on its own merit. Even if it meant desecrating the Temple of Venus in 333AD (Jesus in Hebrew for anyone who wondered) and relinquishing her female empowerment card, by re-erecting what John Allegro in his book ‘The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross’ called a ‘Phallic Symbol of ecstatic fertility and Resurrection’.

Its as close to Eve as I’ll get in my series about fallen Eden I suppose.

Having seen both ‘Annihilation’ and ‘Mother’ recently, it struck me that perhaps I’m plundering similar furrow as far as the cultural zeitgeist is concerned. Mankind being the great corrupter and pathogen in the garden and all that. Mother nature made barren by eschatology.  Although I didn’t really like either movie to be honest, and I suspect ‘Mother’ to be more of that directors bitter sentiments on being an ‘artiste’ in Hollywood.

Go tell it to Kubrick, Darren.

If my series, Purgatorium, ended with a piece featuring John Locke pointing the way  like a wise old owl, then Paradiso’s Fall is imbued with the myth of America as his Tabula Rasa.

One of the phrases from Miltons Paradise lost that jumped out at me as a foundation for the series was ‘The mind in it’s own place..can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

So much of our personal Eden’s will always be tainted by expectation.

It’s something to bare in mind as I’m bearing fruit.

Making a little Eden

No, I haven’t shuffled off this mortal coil.  Not yet. A moral one perhaps, and rather fittingly for these end of days, it’s more of a spiral than a coil, but I digress.

If I’m honest, hitting the half-century mark has felt like a need to hit some sort of reset button. David Van Gough version 5.0. Software updates to include curmudgeonly scowling at the car radio, dodgy knees and a complete  shutdown by 11:30pm.  “Forget that I’m fifty cos you just got paid.”

So in between the manna of commission duties, I’ve been brewing. Stewing. Boiling. Scrawling. And for all the buzzing in my head, it feels like I’m preparing a soup made of flies. Next on the menu, Paradiso’s Fall. If Purgatorium was the entree of a three-course meal, this one is the main. It’ll taste strangely delicious, trust me.

Of course, it’s meant retreating again, closing up shop at La Bodega, dispensing with the three-hour daily commute and wandering no further than the canvases in my little-converted studio/garage down the hill. Not a soul other than the ones that haunt my visions. No sound, other than the whispering pines, the cackle of crows, and the usual voices in my head.

In these dark days of endless noise and looming annihilation,  it’s as close to Eden as one can hope to get.