Precious | 24 x 36 inches | mixed media and 24k gold leaf on cotton rag paper
PRECIOUS
The Chat Noir Dahlia and the Sacred Substance of Life
Some flowers attract with bright colors. Others feel alive in a way that arrests, and draws you closer. The Chat Noir dahlia is one of the second kind.
Its petals open in deep oxblood and wine, so dark at the center they read almost as black. Then, along every curling edge, the color catches light again: crimson, magenta, a flash of violet. When I first spent time with this flower, it felt vibrantly, almost outrageously alive.
That aliveness is what I wanted to paint.
The underpainting was started with watercolor, and then built up with acrylic paint.
The richness of layers, deepening the color.
Working in layers
Precious is 24 x 36 inches, painted on cotton rag paper. Like the other recent works on paper in the Blossoming Collection, it began in colored pencil, then moved through watercolor and acrylic, building the bloom slowly from translucent washes to saturated depth.
Working this way lets the color breathe. The darkest petals hold many layers of red and plum, while the lightest edges are traced with a fine white line, as if light were moving along the rim of each petal.
The flower fills the whole sheet. There is no background to rest in, only the bloom spiraling inward toward its center.
Detail of Giovanni Bellini, The Blood of the Redeemer, about 1465. Egg tempera on wood. The National Gallery, London (NG1233). © The National Gallery, London. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Detail of Precious, 24k gold droplets in the upper right corner.
Thinking about blood
As I painted, I found myself thinking about blood.
At first it was simply the color: the deep, living red of the petals. But the longer I stayed with it, the more the painting seemed to be about blood as a precious substance. Blood carries life through every part of us. It is utterly physical, and at the same time it has always carried a sense of the sacred.
I kept returning to the old story of the crucifixion, when Christ’s side is pierced and his blood is caught in a vessel. The blood is gathered because it is a physical substance that also holds something divine.
That image stayed with me. It points to something I find endlessly moving: the possibility of the divine within the physical. Spirit living in matter. The intersection of consciousness and life.
The gold
This is why Precious carries drops of 24k gold.
They gather at the upper corner of the dahlia across the upper petals and fall to the lower right corner, small points of light held within all that dark red. They are a visual allusion to that precious substance, the place where the physical and the divine touch.
Gold has long been used to signal what is sacred, and in this painting it does that quietly. Seen from across a room, the drops are almost hidden. Up close, they catch the light and shift as you move.
Golden droplets in the upper right corner.
Golden droplets in the bottom right corner, above the signature.
A painting to live with
Precious is a painting about what we hold dear: life itself, and the mystery that it carries something more than the physical.
I hope it brings a sense of warmth and depth to the space where it hangs, and a reminder of how alive, and how precious, life is.
Precious is available as an original work.
Further listening: Rudolf Steiner, “The Etherisation of the Blood,” from Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz (CW 130). Audio via Rudolf Steiner Press: watch on YouTube
