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The Legend of Earth Autumn Winter
The entire sum of heavy elements in all the cosmos is the product of
the deaths of stars. The mountains, oceans, forests, you and I, and the
earth beneath us, are all made of the same celestial ash. By what magic
does this ash reconfigure itself into such wondrous things? What sorcery
manipulates this electrochemical bonding that results in literally infinite
diversity? From whence came and where resides the instructions that allow
carbon to perform its stupefyingly complex interactions? Most of us can
only look up at the sky and wonder.
The ancient egyptians, who had an intuitive sense of the cosmological,
imagined a creator god from which came the earth and sky. The heavens above,
the ethereal womb of creation, is pictured as feminine. The earth below,
physical and reaching up to embrace the sky, is pictured as masculine.
In their mythology, Geb the earth, and Nut the sky, briefly unite before
they are forever divided by the air god, Shu. One of the children of this
divine union was the goddess Isis, who, among other tasks, was responsible
for life. Even 5000 years ago, egyptian clerics had at least a vague notion
that Life - the progeny of Earth and Sky - was the magic that happens when
the ethereal and the material join together.
In the modern era, we understand that the earth, rotating on its axis,
revolves around the sun in an ellipse. Because these factors change the
conditions on earth each 1/4 cycle, creating four distinct periods of weather
within a year, we have chosen to artificially divide the sky into four
equal parts. We call these divisions in the sky Seasons.
In this painting I have chosen to represent only 2 seasons because that
is as much of the sky as we can see at one time here on earth. Winter follows
Autumn as the sky benevolently caresses the earth on its lonely journey
through space. I have alluded to the presence of Spring, beyond the domain
of Winter, by the use of dawn colours upon the distant clouds. Summer exists
in front of the extreme foreground, where the bull elk looks to approaching
Autumn, the time of the ritual that perpetuates life on this planet. And
everywhere, the earth (the symbolic husband), and life (the symbolic child),
reach up with the eternal desire to embrace the maternal sky.
 
 
  
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