Climbing the Tree with the Serpent

Beginning the drafting of the World Tree painting

It has been quiet on my part here in the blogosphere, but rest assured I have been keeping very busy.  Now that I am past unpacking and mostly settled in, I have been focusing on integrating into my work and living space.  I am at that stage where I am figuring out the layout, rearranging things when I find that a particular object should be on my right hand side instead of the left, those kind of things. 

In the midst of that I have been working on a painting commission, a pet portrait sculpture and my big project for the year: a series of paintings based on the chakras and the World Tree.

I have drawings for the chakras up through the throat chakra and I am starting work on the brow chakra now.  Sometime during drafting the heart chakra I had a dream that was telling me to connect the world tree with the chakra system.  I woke up puzzled because up until then I had believed them to be totally separate systems. I did some research and found nothing connecting the two.  Then, when I was about to give up I saw a picture of the sephiroth from the Kabbalistic tradition.  This brought to mind some other geometric systems related to the World Tree that I had explored at an earlier time.  And suddenly, without explanation, in a flash of an image in my head, I conceived the relationship between the two systems.  I went back to the studio and pulled out the drawing I had made a year ago.  This drawing was based on a series of meditations I conducted on each point of the world tree. I spent some time meditating in front of it allow the two systems to integrate.  Since then, I have been also working on revising the original drawing and adapting it to this new discovery.

chakra drawings

So now I am working on both the chakras and the World Tree as a whole series which I hope to have completed by the end of the year.  Each of the chakra paintings will require intensive meditative work on the specific chakra energies and I will expand my meditations as I begin painting the World Tree piece.  All the paintings will have some basis in the traditional systems, but I will allow my meditations to expand on them and I will let the final painting be evidence of where the journey finally takes me.

I will periodically share the process as I develop the series. Now that I am getting back into a regular working schedule, I intend to get back to my regular weekly posts.  I appreciate your patience during this time of transition, I hope the series of posts to come will be a welcome reward for hanging in there!

DoAn
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