You Can’t Kill the Spirit

You Can’t Kill the Spirit is inspired by the protest song sung at Greenham Common and sung to me by my Goddess Mother as she remembered her experiences there with my mother:

You can’t kill the Spirit
She is like a mountain
Old and strong
She goes on and on and on

It has been a source of inspiration as I develop this body of work.

I have finally finished this huge unstretched canvas – it’s taken four months.

These are some notes I made as I created this work:

• NOVEMBER:
• It’s like the chaos of the earth – I’m trying to make beautiful sense of it and find my way through perceived pathways
• Mapping the Soul
• It could take months to make aesthetic sense of this( it did!)
• DECEMBER
• I need to get the deep red and purple roots of the thing on almost like a development of soulseed painting
• Elements of galaxies, growth and a flurry of wings.
• The galaxy is an area of it like a shard or upside-down mountain
• Today is about swoops of gold
• I feel like I am painting Kali Yuga
• There are three states/ Muses of transformation dancing towards the Moon.
• Like an eruption
• I’ve got the dancing form of the thing on
• Don’t push it! Emphasise the flow
• This is how I find myself again!
• Titles are like riddles- I’m not here to explain, but create mystery work open to interpretation.
• Transformation and mystery of the Cosmos
• JANUARY
• Layering on the deep undertones
• There’s a process of refinement going on
• Trying to come up with a process that works
• This painting is going somewhere very gradually….
• I started today invaded by distracting thoughts, but with persistence in painting , just keeping going, I have vanquished them
• Trying to do it like pieces of a puzzle in a way. So focus on small parts of the painting. Having faith that the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts
• Creative ways of Protest
• Trying to get something of the Spirit, the dance, interconnectedness and transformation
• Ancient connections to the moon too and triple Goddess elements
• Something older than Patriarchy
• It’s like the birth of new beings across an everchanging Cosmos
• Painting the brimy cosmic ocean
• I feel like it’s morphing into being now
• A key element seems to have occurred today with one figure-the fiery seed woman overlaps the Cosmic-coming-into-being woman
• Starry weave is yet to be completed
• It is coming into being
• It takes the time it takes
• FEBRUARY
• Making the gateway with drips where the Moon is and the yellow figure
• This painting evolves as I do – it’s a symbolic process
• I feel I may be finished by Spring Equinox
• She is cradling a spiral galaxy – the birth of a galaxy
• I am only seeing this painting one stage at a time. It is a like a cosmic birth. The birth of a star. Star Maps.