Original oil painting on canvas. Framed in wood with a red wood liner. 19 w x 23 h.

Painted by Skye with love xxoo.

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In my painting Metamorphosis the goddess figure represents her transformational power as both giver and taker of life who suggests all things must change. In this painting, goddess is change and change is eternal. The goddess is looking in the distance as if in a trance. Her hand is gently resting on and pointing to her heart—the metaphorical center of life force energy, and a symbol of both love and the goddess. The butterflies are symbolic of the many transitions—psychological births and deaths—we all make from the time we are born to the time we die. The goddess represents our greatest fear of dying, and at the same time, she embodies our only hope for living. The body, including the brain, is all we have when we are born. When health fails, the physical body dies. In the process of making Metamorphosis two years ago, the creative acts of performing and painting returned me to healing answers including: “Am I a body? A mind? A thought?”

I became an author, artist, in addition to a psychic medium. As a medium, someone who mediates communication between the living and spirit, I was able to help others heal from emotional, mental, or spiritual trauma. My mediumship prompted me to engage with the idea of being a woman in deeper, more meaningful ways. In the process, I explored personal metaphors for how I feel about my own power and sensuality. I began studying female deities throughout history. The challenge I gave myself was to paint women as empowered everyday goddesses. As I was looking for positive feminine role models outside my family and culture, I could not find religious iconography with positive representations of both dark and light qualities of the goddess in one all-powerful icon. Other than my own visions and ideas about who the goddess is, the confusion I felt from not having a human female role model or a powerful female deity, like the one God in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, put me in a perpetual state of searching.

I could not help but wonder where the positive depictions of the nature goddess were. I saw her as a beautiful, sensual seductress and a sacred source of all-encompassing power. Most sacred female figures depicted in artworks in western religions like Islam and Christianity demonize or deny the existence of the dark aspects of goddess or glorify the light aspects of goddess in the iconic form of mother or saint. In these artworks, some of her light aspects include pure innocence or the archetypal beloved mother. Her dark aspects that are treated negatively include sex and sensuality, life and death, the destructive power of nature, and human emotion. In eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, there are many goddesses, which can represent shadow aspects of a divinity’s personality. For instance, the goddess Kali is well known for her relentless destructive powers. I found eastern goddesses to be unconvincing as a visionary whole because I was yearning for a more unified vision of light and dark in one goddess in sacred iconic imagery.

In mystical teachings such as Tantric Buddhism, the human body and all forms are in service of the spiritual quest. I could see beauty in form everywhere in my nature walks and then I started to realize nature has an all-encompassing sacred geometry. Sacred geometry involves belief that geometry and mathematical ratios, harmonics and proportion are found in art, music, light, cosmology. This value system is seen as widespread even in prehistory, a cultural universal of the human condition. There, I cultivated a sense of awe and wonder for all of life. I soon came to believe the human body, life on earth, and sex are sacred. xxoo