Reflections on inspiration, spirits, and discovery

By Rose Abrahamson - August 2, 2007

Perhaps through the medium of art, every painter seeks to explore what it means to be human. For me that inquiry has been conducted with whatever material comes to hand, be it paints, collage, found objects, or ephemeral material such as leaves, twigs, etc. Leonardo DaVinci advised painters who lacked inspiration to contemplate with a reflective eye the cracks in an old wall. He said there is a map of the universe in the lines that time draws on these old walls. Pencil lines, which I love, reflect the wanderings and whimsies in the cracked ceilings of my life. (Come to think of it, the lines in my face could tell a tale.)

In order to describe a universe of this kind, created by chance and dream, the artist strives to live in it, and it is there amid the cracks that I find my inner world.

We all have our private worlds. I paint mine. To paraphrase Shakespeare: I conjure up spirits from the vast deep. There is just one step up to my studio but when I enter it a different persona takes over - a creature who is daring, irreverent, and free. Left outside is my ego, mindset, and dreams of personal glory. This ship has come to explore unchartered waters. I have no pre-conceived ideas. Figures appear - once six appeared together on the canvas. "Who are those people and what are they doing on my canvas?" was the name of a show I once had. These beings seem to come from some archetypal subconscious.

A young friend came to the studio, saw one of my paintings, and said, "That is a hierophant." Never having heard the word I asked her to spell it and later looked it up. Hierophant means a sacred being. The definition includes mention of secret rites among ancient Greek women, so I named my painting Persephone.

Last year in a show at the Field Gallery my friend Richard Lee looked at my painting of a figurative piece adorned with green hair in a sylvan setting and exclaimed, "Rose, that's Green Man!" He explained that there is a book of Celtic deities called Green Man, one of the rare male deities involved with the growth of plants.

Sometimes sweet surprises happen. I started one of my paintings by using a collage from part of an old drawing that depicted a large white oval. As I worked, I began covering the drawing with black paper. Eventually the entire canvas was painted a rich dark color. I enlivened it with gold leaf and other metallic bits, especially in the upper parts. A few weeks later when I looked at it closely I noticed the gold leaf in the upper area looked like a bird, and I remembered that the collage under the paper that the painting began with contained a white oval - an egg - from which a golden bird had hatched.

My two most recent paintings are in stark contrast to each other. The first is a wild collage, playful, zany, and exuberant - so much fun to paint. The other is the crack in the wall of life represented in a larger than life, untidy figure of a woman. She stands alone in a rough, scratchy landscape. Amid the messiness she still manages to remain somehow indomitable. I'm tempted to go back and make the figure more presentable. But my artist friend Cindy Kane will not let me touch it, so it stays as it is.

As I write this I realize that these two paintings, one so light-hearted, and one so ponderous, represent where I am now: on the one hand, still being able to work and revel in the joy of inspiration and discovery; and on the other hand, acknowledging the many untidy ramifications of what it means to be human.

Rose Abrahamson, a well-known Island artist living in Tisbury, will celebrate her 86th birthday in October.