PRAYER PAINTINGS 2018
"Protect the innocent. Restrain the greedy and the treacherous. Lead us out of our tribulation into a quiet land."
- Robert Louis Stevenson, Another Prayer for Evening
These paintings have grown out of my need to keep painting and to keep making a kind of beauty that is meaningful to me, even though the United States ( and the world!) is facing a dark time poisoned by authoritarian threats. It's important to me that my artwork is not just another form of materialistic escapism. The creation of these was therapeutic for me and living with them has been nourishing. I experience them as visual prayers that wisdom will prevail.
At first I thought of this series as Restrain The Greedy, from a prayer by Robert Louis Stevenson. I longed for a benevolent and all powerful goddess to step in and make the bullsh*t stop. It was fueled in particular by fury, outrage, and anguish over the criminal actions of the current administration separating immigrant children from their parents.
In these paintings you'll see strong female leaders of all sorts: Athena-like huntresses, Valkyries, Boadicea, Liberty in many forms. I wanted to see active heroic women. I suddenly developed an extreme aversion to depicting women in the way I'd painted in the past, which I realized were modeled on the ways my favorite male Artists had painted women: Usually nude and lounging passively. A refrain repeated in my head as I painted that was something like "I want ACTIVE. I want CHANGE. NOT Passive."