[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="821"] Meditation: 7-26-2025, “The Black Madonna?” [/caption]
This painting is an attempt at a subtle visual paradox: it teaches you how not
to look at it. The composition splits between what demands attention and what
actually rewards it.
Sustained focus on the work somehow empties it of meaning. But of course,
paradoxically, my hope is that it does demand sustained focus. Does the
revelation happen when your attention drifts from green eye to shadows and then
to the mouth? The shadowed cheek? The golden throat.
When, in life, in meditation, or in prayer, does the enlithtenment occur?
For me the goddess emerges not from direct scrutiny but from the edge of sight,
exactly as the meditation revealed her to me.
I tried to represent rather than produce the strange effect of the vision. In
which I could not see the details of the goddess by gazing directly at her, but
rather her details arose only out of the corner of my eye. The painting is an
attempt at teaching the same oblique attention that I gleamed during this most
recent out-of-body meditation.
Blue darkness doesn’t merely provide background; it’s the necessary void from
which divine presence can emerge. The goddess requires emptiness to manifest,
just as peripheral vision requires a relaxed, unfocused gaze. The sacred hence,
appears where we’re not looking. Often not in climactic moments but, in moments of transition.