On Motherhood and Veneration
Vendredi (French), Viernes (Spanish), Fredag (Scandinavian) and Friday (Freya’s Day). All the names the ancient peoples have given to this day show the deep reverence our ancestors had for Venus, goddess of love and wisdom. The names of the days still appear on our calendars but they have all but lost their meaning and their deep wisdom. When I created the paintings for my exhibit , Celestial Data for daydreaming, I anchored my process on the wisdom of our ancient myths and sought to bring new light into them for our time.
I am an artist who thinks like a mother and a mother who thinks like an artist. So I cannot help but associate my Venus process with Motherhood. Venus was, after all , mother to Cupid, Love himself. What made me understand and appreciate the myths in relation to the planets was a simple reframing of the myths. Instead of imagining the gods and goddesses as personalities, I imagined them as forces. Forces that don’t just bear quantity but also have quality. This made me realize that when the myths told stories about Venus, the goddess of love, they spoke of a force that is around us. A force that exists in us and a force we imbibe when we place our consciousness to it.
It made me think of love and all the qualities we have ascribed to it from divine love to familial love to the love for country and of course romantic love. We think of our emotions as inconsequential and unimportant when it comes to the evolution and the betterment of the human race, but there it is at the centre of it all. How many sonnets, love songs, stories about love have we made throughout time? There it is at the heart of what powers human will. Even as we do our work in the world we speak of the love for our work. Love IS at the center of human power. It is a force that runs through us from somewhere deep inside us.
There is nothing greater than motherhood to teach a human being what love is. Parents love their kids. That love comes with its different qualities depending on the character of the human that wields the power to love. Being mother to Mecca who has her own very specific needs and challenges, I have experienced a different kind of love. One that has a fierceness I had never had before. I found my roar which school had me bury somewhere deep inside me. Now I had someone to protect with my life. At the same time, I also found a gentleness, a kind of grace I never knew I had. I focused on this love when I painted my Venus.
In the way that I found all these new strengths from experiencing the new love brought by being mother to Mecca, doing the Venus painting allowed me to come upon a different quality of love that helps me with life in our time. Veneration. The root word of Veneration is also Venus. To me, this quality of love is imbued with sacredness. I found a new power in this process and I poured it all into my Venus painting. I found that each act in my life could have the color of sacredness if I put my intention into it. Then I completely understood what a sacrament really is. The process of making an act sacred through love.
All throughout the time I was making my Venus painting, even in my ordinary life, I kept doing a meditation. With each stroke of the brush, with each act of making food, serving food, each fold of the laundry, I repeated in my heart “This is my intention, this is my life force, this is my sacrament.” It changed the quality of every act. It changed the way I saw my life. The quality of love that is in me has been transformed by the process of creating “Venus:Impossible Flowers Bloom in Impossible Landscapes”.
I hope that I have configured the lightwaves of this painting in a way that carries my new consciousness. I hope that with it, I honor love in all its aspects. I hope that when these lightwaves reach you, you can feel the sacredness I embedded in the light. I write this on a Friday and I celebrate sacred love with you today.
