Well, the only piece of artwork in this issue is one of my own pieces, so I really ought to be able to explain it. However, that’s a difficult thing for me to do…
I was in a panic about the very few submissions of artwork, the very Sunday the submissions were due, and had no inspiration whatsoever. After morning Mass, though, I was suddenly struck by the idea of a hand, holding a rose, pierced by the thorns of the rose, and thought that it might fit into the theme of suffering. I wasn’t at all sure what I intended to represent; it was simply the only thing I could think of.
Of course, a red rose – symbolizing passionate love – would make the most intense painting. Yellow roses (friendship) or white (purity) don’t pack quite the same punch. And the background should be garden-like, with a ray of sunlight showing above the shadows. I painted it, without much modification, that night.
The next morning, looking at it, I started to wonder what it could represent. Entrenched at the time in a discussion about celibacy with a Protestant friend of mine, I started to think this painting would work as an analogy. The rose – romantic love – plucked out, which entails suffering, and offered to the beloved; in this case, God. As I thought it over, it started to make a lot more sense, and now I wonder how I could have painted it without thinking of such an obvious interpretation. Of course, I can’t take credit for something I didn’t intend, but I think I know Who can.
Certainly, I do not want to profane your interpretation of your own work. If you would allow this comment, it would be as so:
I thought to mention, simply, that the coincidence you explain of the painting, it reminds me of a sort of Jungian sense of artistic, even social ‘vision’. (Personally, I do not try to go so far as to try to grapple with the paradigm of “the collective unconscious” — related to his theory of vision, as it is. It is not such that I myself can make heads or tails about, so to speak. I think there is something profound about his sense of what is vision, that much I know — poorly though I make a thesis of it ;^)
I myself am not certain of whether a work of art will always be interpretable as to a single, finite point, may I say. In no less, a work of art may serve to convey something deeply emotional, even spiritual, is it not so?
Perhaps, it may be like as how there may be inspired a deeper, spiritual thought, inspired as upon the sight of something so simple and artfully beautiful as a few birds alighting on the ground and drawing their sustenance, or the collection of little flowers on a lilac bough, or the variegated texture of a mountainside.
and at that, but words fail to convey the beauty of that painting
— Sean · Mar 27, 04:55 PM · #