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The task of the artist is to represent his creative journey. In our ever-changing world this is achieved through metaphor. Such a representation is like an electronic microscope making visible the tiniest items less than the lightwave length in size.
The artist discovers the connection between subordinate objects or ideas and it looks like building a bridge above a deep gulf initially dividing two very distant concepts. In this way, for example, an image transference uncovers the previously unseen connection between the windmill sails and the butterfly wings, the flowing water and the flow of fabric, the neck of a jar and the neck of a shirt and so on.
Another way of representing the artist’s journey is through a script, a series of episodes, each having a designated place on a timeline ‘from dusk till dawn’. Every episode contains symbolic ideas reflecting the spiritual legacy of humankind, the thoughts and feelings shared by all human beings.
Those primary perceptions are genetically formed and a result of human evolution. Jung called them archetypes of human consciousness.
NB The movement along the symbolic Human Way in the painting is from right to left.
Episodes
According to certain mythological perceptions, the Sun goes down into the waters of the underworld in the West and moving to the East emerges anew in the morning (‘resurrection’). In the painting, this is reflected in diagonally interchanging positions of the Sun and the Moon (with a maximum distance between them).
PS. In graphic form, it can be viewed as the sun disk moving in parallel to the lower border of the painting.
Consider the symbolism of the certain features in the painting:
- the windmill butterflies: butterfly – a symbol of immortality, as indicated in its life cycle from ‘life’ in the form of a bright green caterpillar through ‘death’ – the dark chrysalis – to the ‘resurrection’ of flying; those windmills can be the ones attacked by Don Quixote, the hero of the famous novel by Miguel de Cervantes;
- the “shell virgin” is a symbol of contemplation and withdrawing into one’s own world at the end of the day.
The structure of the painting
The symmetries that can be traced in this composition piece:
the S-shaped lines of the foreground forming the symbol of infinity ∞
diagonal symmetry in straight lines
the ‘snail’ – the ‘dragon’
the cage with a parrot – the ‘cloud-balloon’
the sequence of the ‘butterfly book’, the flying butterfly and the windmills
Overall, the stationary parts, as points of ‘contemplation’ in the painting, are related to the moving parts and those inner symmetries help to unite the different images in the painting into a single composition. This composition piece in its entirety is a symbolic representation of the most important stages or phases in the spiritual history of a person in the general flow of life.