Twist of Fate
Tetelestai, it is finished.
“Woman with Pomegranate.” Completed in Jerusalem, Israel, on Friday, September 13, 2019. Approx. 32x38” oil on linen canvas.
This painting is completely different from anything else I’ve ever painted. I have not used oils since 2006; this is an oil painting. I rarely use browns or beiges or realistic color tones for figures; this is a figure in colors that could exist in real life. I usually paint very stylized images with very heavy outlines and little regard for material reality; this figure is blurred and I tried to make her as material and substantial as possible.
Perhaps this is because I usually paint goddesses, inner goddesses, abstractions of the divine feminine, and immaterial beings. Whether you believe she existed or not, Eve was not a goddess. She was a woman with a pomegranate. She was a person, a human just like you and me. In her story, she does not exist in some divine otherworld—or at least not for long. She is as material as you and me; as fallible as you and me; she is, in fact, the primary representative of fallibility itself.
I don’t believe Eve literally existed. I don’t believe she ate a pomegranate (a garnet-apple) or any kind of apple or what have you. I don’t believe one woman’s choice to disobey divine authority is literally the reason for my own fallibility—my own sinfulness, if you will.
But I do believe that we are all terribly imperfect beings, and yet filled with divine light and love and the divine spark of creativity (“man, sub-creator, the refracted light through whom is splintered from a single white to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind.” ~J.R.R. Tolkien). We are here, perhaps for some unnamed and unwritten divine purpose, but while we are here we must contend with our own mortality and with the temptation to act upon our evil and animal instincts. We have been given the gift of consciousness, from which arises the beauty of language and art and the magic of music and invention; but we have also been cursed with a consciousness that forces us to knowingly live by subsisting on the life force of other once-living beings, forces us to compete with other life forms for the very right to live (though the right is no more ours than theirs). Mere animals do not have to choose—they simply are and do.
And what a gift and curse is this! And what a twist of fate to descend from crawling apes striving only to survive, to be born into a species of erect and conscious thinking beings who must always know we could have chosen differently at every turn, but never be able to turn back! To be blessed and cursed with the power and the burden of choice, and to know when our survival or our desires harm another. Surely ignorance must be a sort of bliss, but it is not ours to wonder at or wish for. We have only the reality that was bestowed upon us, and what we choose to make of it.
The forbidden fruit has already been eaten. Consciousness has already been awakened. We cannot turn back now. The fruit is bursting, juicy and delicious. Eat of it, and paint visions with the blood that’s been spilled in your name.
