New heartwood series by me.

I started this painting around this time last year. It has taken a year to complete. I didn’t plan for it to happen this way, but the way things happen are always more aligned by the stars than how we could ever know or plan them to be.

I had started with the first heartwood painting, one that I have at the Hive Gallery now.

But the colors I ended up with on the final round of layers were a mixture of rare gemstone colors, lapis lazuli, cinnabar red, and royal amethyst purple. I use some gold as well to blend the natural color of the wood into the paint.

I always think that wood is so beautiful and that in its self, with the proper glaze, it is a work of art, and incorporating the wood into a painting is always an exceptional idea. However, the execution is not always as easy as it looks. In this painting, I chose to limit my colors, and I chose to use red and blue, colors known to create a 3D optic effect due to our optic nerves and the way they see color.

The heartwood is supposed to be colors of blood and veins, reminiscent of the heart and arteries.

I wanted it to look like a 3D slice of a heart if it were wood. Does that make sense?

“When you look at this piece,

it is the spirit of the tree, coming out at me.

I once was a tree,

and then the tree was once me,

and out of the redroot of yesterday,

I saw faces in the trees,

watching me.”

The painting has many faces. In each face is a different archetype of emotion, a place to hide for a while, behind the mask of our subconscious selves, hiding from the world, inside the mystery of the trees.

In each face in the painting, I tell a story behind the expression. Can you figure what they are saying?

I do not want to ruin it by telling you each and every secret these tree spirits have told me, but I know that one of them is an ancient crone, one is peaceful, another is curious….

When I read a tarot card for this painting I am received with the magician card, symbolizing that the many faces, as I have assumed, are one and the same, as we are all many faces. But also, we are lost without one another, we were not meant to be alone, were are tribal. In the many archetypes of the tribe, we see the rainbow, in the individual, the tribe exists in the self, I am the tribe, the tribe is me….

Who is your tribe?

My heart is one. Singular. It belongs to no one but me.

In my heart, I find the many faces of myself. I find that inside myself, I am many people, many emotions, many archetypes. I am all of them. I can embrace them all now, I am not afraid to be all of me….

To possess the shadow self, we must accept ourselves for our flaws as well as our talents. In the heart, we see that all can be transmuted with the potent furnace of the heart fire, a place where shamans call home, for there in the hearth, the fire burns, and turns all to the ashes, and that which is left behind is not the golden heart that is alchemy, it is in the spirit of transmutation that we find the answers.

This painting is the beginning of the quest I will be on. I will search for the alchemist’s golden heart stone, the power to transmute hate into love, death into life. Cali, the destroyer, comes down and kills, and also gives life, in the breath of the opening the sliver of life is formed, and we begin our journey here on earth. Our life is part of the energetic infrastructure that can never be killed.

You see we are energy, and energy cannot cease to exist, only transfer in shape. Therein lies the clue, and the answers to alchemy.

For you see as we use the heart to heal, as the soil in the ground, that takes all the bones, takes all the death, the tears, the blood, the graves, and with that the soil breaks it down, breaks it down, breaks it down. Breaking it down into another component, one of molecules filled with life! New life! Gold is the heart metal….

It is pure love,

It is heart,

heartwood is the heart in trees.

We are trees, the trees are we.

Then that soil is ready for a seed.

The hummingbird flutters and the wind sweeps,

The seeds blow,

and the gold seed finds its way to the soil.

The molecules ready to give life, fertile with new cause, new fresh beginnings,

The heart is ready for death, and life, and death, in the soil, where the tree grows,

I give life to myself,

In the heart of the tree I exist.