HEAVENLY CREATURES
While a man rests his self-worth on how he is seen by others, a woman’s status is grounded in how she sees herself. Is there anything more powerful than that? It is only in the last five thousand years that men made God a man. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst, claimed that during the Stone Age men believed all life came from the ‘Great Mother’. During this time, women were revered and worshipped. Then men decided things needed to change. Men like to run the show, but rely on women to make them feel like men. When women run the show, they don’t need men to remind them who they are. We men folk have a lot to learn, and I have learned a great deal from Gail – my wife and muse – since I met her. This collection celebrates that mystifying blend of feminine beauty and strength. Heavenly Creatures , while loyal to that enduring genre of the celebrated nude and the venerated goddess in art, explores the majesty of a woman’s presence. I think it is time for things to change back, and this new suite of paintings honours this notion while creating images that I hope collectors find beautiful, lyrical and arresting. From the simplest appreciation of a woman adjusting her hair clasp in ‘Consider Me’ to the reclining sylph beckoning her owls in ‘Night Messengers’, one could deduce that there is more going on than meets the eye. As far as I am concerned, there always is, and these paintings hint at deeper, primal forces. Things are changing and events unfolding as these mysterious women allow us into their inner sanctum. These women, through every knowing glance and each tweak of a hairpin, ask the viewer to consider that these seemingly minor gestures could be the basic groundwork for magic that enriches our planet, bringing harmony to a world beset by male dominance and anarchic vanity.
These women are performing rituals, whispering muted incantations, whose ripple effects change the day and transform an age. Does the viewer equate physical beauty with perfection and order, or does one ask where these women have come from? I have seen Gail endure many struggles throughout our life together, some of them seemingly overwhelming. Similarly, the women in this collection are fashioned from their experience, and shaped by their despair and triumph; they are the High Priestesses of our time. Like the phoenix risen from the ashes, they are now free. The women in this work shine because they are divinely feminine, because theirs is not masculine energy at all. Their appeal is not reliant on the praise of others. They radiate that particular essence which makes a man need to search for the feminine face of God. Men covet the beauty of women and women make a man more beautiful. The image of women monopolises the art world, where paintings of men are less popular. Women visit more museums and purchase more art than men, whilst male artists create paintings of women that will ultimately be bought by females. The fullness of this understanding makes the ambitions of the alpha male cumbersome and childish. Men are not naturally interested in balance. It is inequality and the sense of having more than the other which drives them further in the quest to compete, to beat, to win and to feel like a man. Men do so much in their lives to prove a point. Women achieve so much more by not wanting to prove anything.
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