"Daughters of the River"
28" x 36" (71.1cm x 91.4cm)
Oil on Linen
"Let me begin with explaining the concrete elements of this painting. First the name was chosen because the sirens are most commonly referred to as the daughters of the river god Achelous. The setting was developed following research by scholars such as Jane Ellen Harrison who tell us that the sirens were not sea-maidens but instead were island dwellers inhabiting "a flowery meadow". The characters were created to be consistent with the fact that Sirens continue to be used as a symbol for dangerous temptation embodied by women. Finally we need a boat if they are going to sing to mariners. You can recognize the body language of stalking as the three directly focus on their prey as if they are tuning into the very sounds of the sailors heartbeat. So what is missing? The characters are not half bird half human. What else is missing? The typical horror scene like the description Circe gives in The Odyssey of them "lolling there in their meadow, round them heaps of corpses rotting away, rags of skin shriveling on their bones." On the surface sirens are viewed as destroyers. What if we look deeper. What if the sirens are threshold guardians gauging our readiness to move on, not only to the afterlife but to the next stage in this life. In Plato's cosmology the sirens are responsible for the revolving of the celestial bodies around the earth. He states "on the upper surface of each sphere is perched a Siren, who goes round with them hymning a single tone". This reminds me of the chanting of Buddhist monks. It reminds me of the idea of Taoism, that pattern behind the natural world. So maybe the sirens represent that inward calling to advance through life and grow from our experiences. In that case, only the ones who surrender and artificially alter their journeys become part of that large heap of "rags of skin shriveling on their bones"."
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