Surrender is my final painting in this series and one I am still working on. This is my ultimate answer ... to surrender to life and live it on it's own terms. To surrender is not to give up but to stop fighting the natural course of things.
The walls of this cave are carved with old warriors, kings, religious figures and totem animals. The feeling I get is that they all died getting this woman here - to this place of surrender - and were then turned into carved rock.
Originally, the woman was going to be long dead and dessicated - clothed in the remains of what was once a beautiful, flowing dress. It was going to be a statement about my ultimate fear - the death of humanity. The green life growing from her body was going to be my statement of hope - that other life would spring from us.
I began to realise, however, that getting through fear brings one to a place of peace.
That's the point of the painting - not that we will end or that horrible things will happen or that something might grow from that, but that surrendering to the natural flow of life and accepting everything about it brings one to a place of ultimate stillness. Rather than fighting as all the warriors carved into the stone have, the woman is surrendering - accepting life on its own terms (terms which look very generous in the painting).
Again, all the warriors in the walls appreared fully-formed as another example of spontaneous apparition after the intital abstract part of the painting's creation. I did not intend to create them. One of the reasons it is taking so long to finish is my reluctance to influence what is already there. You can see in its raw form how my paintings are created. That may be more important than any beautiful object I can create from it. At this point, the painting can take many roads. To choose one is to destroy the other possibilities.
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