Please help me name this newest retablo, just finished today. (Think of a retablo as a box containing a story.) What story do you see?
(Click on this second smaller image to increase size of picture. You should then be able to Zoom in and use your scroll bar to see different parts of the image close up. Use + and – to zoom in and out.)
Someone on a social site I post on once stated that he couldn’t understand the contradiction between my statement that I was an agnostic and the fact that a number of my retablos made use of images of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
One side of the Mexican coin as well as the Universal coin. (click on images to make larger.)
I answered that for me, she was a symbol of that gentle, loving, peaceful, motherly, female side of Mexico that balanced the macho, warlike, violent male side. He didn’t understand this and actually ended our correspondence—a perfect example of that force I sought to counterbalance. I have just finished a retablo entitled “Macho” that demonstrates the male side of the dichotomy.
My newest retablo deals with the dichotomy between the masculine and the feminine in both Mexico and the world.
I also have a sculpture I completed over a year ago entitled, “Anima/Animus.”
Since first reading Jung 32 years ago, I have been almost constantly engaged in examining that force which seems to drive the world—that shifting between anima and animus that the I Ching might call yin and yang and that religion might classify as good and evil. Not that either the anima or animus is purely good or evil, but certainly all is a matter of trying to balance. This is a simplistic statement of a very complex matter, but one I often deal with in my work. This statement is being made after the fact as I very rarely have a concept in mind when I begin a work. I like to see where each piece leads me and I’m as surprised as the viewer may be at where I am led by the process.
ANIMA/UNSHADOWED
This detail examines the shattering of the male side of the ego by a feminine consciousness. The gold object in the glass case is a small replica of the instrument used to sever the head in sacrificial prehispanic temple ceremonies. The hammer shattering the glass is meant to symbolize the gentling effect of the feminine on the masculine.
Day 28 The prompt today was to write a poem about a color.
Yellow
You were so red, so white.
So much of you was blue.
Yellow is what I missed in you—
that brilliant optimism—
that power of the sun.
There was that black in you
that cancelled it out.
You were the artist who understood color the most.
That color created by the union of yellow and black, you knew.
Your white hair, confined in a pony tail
or streaming down your back
in your wild man look
prompted strangers to ask
if you were a shaman,
or declare you to be one.
That red that flamed out from your work,
subtly put there even in places where it had no
logical purpose for being.
That red tried to make things right.
All of us who knew you
knew the blue.
It was the background color of all of your days.
It was the blanket in which we wrapped ourselves at night,
trying to be close,
but always always divided
by blue.
For fifteen years,
I believed that one day I’d bring you to yellow.
There were splashes of it, surely,
throughout our lives together.
You on the stage, reading your heart,
me in the audience, recognizing
all the colors from within you—even yellow.
Finding the pictures you had taken of me
at the art show, looking at your work—
those pictures taken even before we ever met.
I discovered, after you’d passed,
that you had recognized
me even then, when I thought
I was the only one
angling for a meeting—
sure of my need to know those secret parts of you
that I will never know
now that you have given yourself
to the black
or blue
or red
or even to the white.
Whatever your ever after
has delivered you to.
A new life later,
I am suffused
by my own canvas
of memories of you—
every other pigment
splashed against
a vivid background
of yellow.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 