Condor Dream

This piece is painted as two parts. The lower part is of a dream of a condor, whose back I was riding on. This represents the lower or spiritual world of dreams.

The upper piece is where I was in the daylight in Sedona, Arizona in a Cherokee hogan facing east with the sun coming in the door. This part represants the middle world, the physical, in shamanistic cosmology.

In the Light of Lilith

This is a painting about the archetype of Lilith which I have traced through Babylonian, Egyptian and Hebrew texts. Usually she emerges as a dark plutonic beauty, the bearer of the demons and devourer of children. She conveys a sense of sublime, the terror of the fat snake next to the sweet flowers-projecting discomfort within our comfort zone of beauty. For me she is an authentic and strong woman .

The painting was difficult to follow, to hold delicately. Each flower has her own story and needed attending to.

I am to my Beloved as My Beloved is to Me

The patterns on the jaguar’s coat remind me in places of the Hebrew letters.

Jews have, for a long time, been reading the same texts in a certain order, imprinting and tracing cycles. I am somewhat more organic and this piece was in part about learning order and discipline in that the jaguar coat has incredible order that is not at first apparent. I have represented this learning in the “lamed” (the letter, לְ) ‐ a bit like a snake, that poured down from the top of the painting ‐ which has, as one of its meanings,”learn”. This is an example of one of the layers of the painting.

Tallis and American Indian owl feather dance fan

Two sacred items: each with a story of guidence and wisdom for me. While painting this, there was an owl hooting outside for many nights.

Adonai, you raised my soul from the lower world

Shamanically speaking the writings of Psalms, the Bible and the Zohar are so very beautiful. They “read” differently about the soul. I experienced this wonderment while making this painting. A sense of the Divine.

Jews have, for a long time, been reading the same texts in a certain order, imprinting and tracing cycles. I am somewhat more organic and this piece was in part about learning order and discipline in that the jaguar coat has incredible order that is not at first apparent. I have represented this learning in the “lamed” (the letter, לְ) ‐ a bit like a snake, that poured down from the top of the painting ‐ which has, as one of its meanings,”learn”. This is an example of one of the layers of the painting.

The Keepers of the Wall took my veil from me

The work “took” in Hebrew can also be understood as “endure”. This changes the meaning in this particular piece a lot for me.

I am fascinated by the fact that because most of us can’t understand Biblical Hebrew, we take the usual translations for granted...but our understanding is so much more when we go deeper into these mystical texts.

In the above piece, my notion was that the connotation of having one’s veil taken is of lack of choice and a violation, but when one looks at it as the veil being endured (or suffered, which mean to bear, or carry, as another nuance of the Hebrew) then the sense of it becomes that the veil, our personal mantle, was held on our behalf.

Earlier in that particular verse, it is said that “I was wounded by the guards” and my version is that that is part of our testing for our growth.

I can sit with a letter, or piece for weeks 

The snake is the Shamanic medicine about transformation and power.

Water Patterns

We lived next to a tidal marsh in America for a while. Every day the water came in and when she left, the grasses followed her eddies, making these patterns.

During this time there was a horse in my journeys that showed me my message of breathing in as the tide. As I breathed in, the tide came in, as I breathed out I could see what I made manifest, as was reflected in the shapes of the eddies of the grasses. 

Galactic Centre

Whilst lying on a jetty next to the Breede river near Vermaklikheid, South Africa, I watched the stars...