This series is my most recent work, executed over the past six months. In a sense it is the culmination of a lifetime of over 65 years devoted to art... Read more
Artist's Statement:
This series is my most recent work, executed over the past six months. In a sense it is the culmination of a lifetime of over 65 years devoted to art, and I feel grateful to my Creator that he has saved the best for last. My life in art has covered a wide span of styles,mediums, images – ranging from oils, watercolours, pastels, woodblock prints, iconography, fabric collage and tapestry, as well as digital prints. Unlike most artists, who spend a good many yearsarriving at a style and who then continue to refine and perfect it for the rest of their lives, something in me continued to push me to move on – as soon as I felt I had mastered a particular genre or style, it seemed necessary to keep going to the 'next hurdle'. Up to last year, when I finally arrived at this series, I often wondered myself about this tendency in me, of always moving on.The series that preceded this one was called 'The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise' and in a sense it paved the way for the Magdalene series. I was already in my eighties and after a series of operations, culminating in a shoulder replacement, and then a stroke, which took away half the vision in one eye, my prospects as a painter were pretty bleak. My painting arm was relatively useless and my once skillful hand wobbled all over the place when I tried to hold a brush.
Looking over some of my unfinished paintings from over the years I thought the least I could do was to try and complete them in some way so that I wouldn't leave a lot of unfinished work behind. Some of the floral watercolours were the likeliest candidates, so I began to look at them in a new way – as representing the Garden of Eden, and I could even envisage the way forward – in some cases it involved using gold leaf (which I learned as an iconographer) and collage(which I had learned in my years as a fabric appliqué artist). The idea evolved, and when I looked for possible images for Adam and Eve, I found the perfect choice in Masaccio's 'Expulsion From Paradise' – the two figures expressed in a powerful way the anguish of our first ancestors at being expelled into a harsh world. The series took off and I evolved a way of working using printed images of the two figures, either enlarged, or reduced, printed to paper, or tracing paper for transparency, etc. By the time I finished I had evolved a whole new way of working that didn't require a steady hand for holding a paint brush. From there it was just one step on to my last and most important body of work: 'The Search for Mary Magdalene'.
I had just finished reading a book by my friend Cynthia Bourgeault called 'The Meaning of Mary Magdalene – The Woman at the Heart of Christianity'. Suddenly this Saint, who I had hardly paid much attention to, except in the usual perception of her as a repentant harlot, became alive and important. Something in me sensed that her disappearance after she witnessed the resurrected Christ had left a huge gap in the Christianity which was passed down to us through the ages, a gap which is still affecting humankind. My artistic vision was rekindled: I felt that here was a subject I would happily devote what remaining time I had left to expressing in beautiful visual terms a message which wasn't threatening in a doctrinal way, nor provoke argument or dissent. My unique background of having mastered a variety of techniques and methods for making pictures came to the fore, and I felt well equipped for handling this theme of visualising an enigmatic figure for whom there are very few real images except a variety of post-Renaissance paintings of hyper-emotional whores in varying stages of undress. It was this image I wanted to dispel, which resulted in a series of work called 'X-Rated', showing the Magdalene surrounded by printed versions of her in that particular mode. By using modern technology I was able to find and print a variety of 'Marys' from over the ages and use them through the medium of collage.
I began to explore other themes – those of her first sighting of Christ after the Resurrection (in a group of pictures called 'Rabboni'), as well as the anointing of Christ's feet. As it evolved I began to feel that these works were the target which all my years as a painter were pointing to – that all the techniques and methods I had exploredformed the means by which I could best express this subject, whose importance in my life grew with each picture I made of her. More and more I felt the importance of bringing her to the forefront, where people will become aware of what they've been missing in their faith and in their lives: the presence of the feminine. And not in a strident or arrogant way, but in the realm of beauty. I once heard this expressed in the phrase 'man's beauty is his strength; woman's strength is her beauty'. October 2017