Art

Blossoming Dream

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A purple unicorn resting under pink blossom trees with a moonlit sky in the background.

Beneath a swollen moon, in a grove where the cherry trees loose their blossoms like slow snow, a violet unicorn keeps her repose. She has folded her legs beneath her in the manner of a creature wholly at ease, and she turns her gaze outward past the edge of the world, as though attending to some music the rest of us cannot hear. This is Blossoming Dream, and into one still image it gathers three of the oldest emblems the imagination has kept: the horned beast of purity, the flowering tree of the passing season, and the moon that presides over them both.

Each of these has a long pedigree. Set side by side upon a single canvas, they answer one another in a way that rewards a slower kind of looking. What follows traces the three threads back toward their sources, and shows why they were always meant to be woven together.

The beast older than the bestiaries

The unicorn did not begin in fairy tales. Its earliest surviving description in the West comes from the Greek physician Ctesias of Cnidus, who in the fourth century before our era set down an account of a swift, single-horned “wild ass of India” in his Indica. Ctesias had served as court physician in Persia, and his report, embroidered though it surely was by the campfire testimony of travellers, gave Europe a beast it would keep for two thousand years. Pliny the Elder later fixed the name monoceros upon the creature in his Natural History, and from those classical seeds the whole later flowering grew.

It was the Physiologus, an early Christian book of beasts and their meanings, that gave the unicorn its most enduring story: the fierce animal, untakeable by force, grows gentle in the presence of a maiden and lays its head in her lap, whereupon the hunters close in. The medieval mind read this at once as allegory, the unicorn standing for Christ and the maiden for the Virgin, and so the beast passed into the bestiaries, the cathedrals, and the great woven cycles of the late Middle Ages. Two of those cycles survive as marvels: the seven hangings of the Hunt of the Unicorn at the Met Cloisters, woven around 1500, and the six panels of The Lady and the Unicorn at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. Curiously, the cherry tree that presides over Blossoming Dream has an old kinship with these works. Among the hundred and more plant species identified in the Cloisters tapestries, a flowering cherry stands prominently behind the hunters as they enter the wood.

The horn itself carried a lore apart from the beast. A powder ground from it, the alicorn, was believed to sweat in the presence of poison and to purify tainted water, and so kings paid the price of a small estate for a length of it. Most of these treasures were the spiraled tusks of the narwhal, the small Arctic whale whose ivory tooth, sold across a credulous continent, sustained the legend long after any traveller had claimed to see the animal alive. The connoisseur of unicorns who wishes to go to the root of the matter can do no better than Odell Shepard’s The Lore of the Unicorn, first published in 1930 and still the most graceful survey of the whole tradition.

The unicorn and the moon

Shepard is worth pausing over, for it is he who drew out the thread that binds the unicorn to the moon above her in this painting. In the old symbolic pairings the unicorn was set against the lion, and where the tawny lion stood for the sun, the white unicorn was read as the moon: the one solar, masculine, and blazing; the other lunar, feminine, and cool. The very whiteness of the creature carries the argument, for white and silver were the colours of the moon in the language of the alchemists, colours of receptivity, intuition, and the untainted mind. When lion and unicorn appear together, the symbolists spoke of the coniunctio, the alchemical marriage in which the solar and lunar principles are reconciled and made one.

The connection runs deeper than metaphor. When the arms of the Le Viste family, who commissioned the Cluny tapestries, were deciphered, the heralds found three silver crescent moons upon a band of blue. The moon was woven into the unicorn’s story from the first, quite literally, in silver thread. To place a unicorn beneath a full moon, then, is to return her to her proper heaven. She is a lunar animal come home to the light that made her, and the painter has rendered that moon not as a cold disc but as a living, swirling presence, ringed in a halo of pale fire, the true sovereign of the scene.

The cherry tree and the doctrine of the passing hour

The blossoms falling through the moonlight bring the third and gentlest of the old traditions. The Japanese practice of hanami, the viewing of flowers, reaches back more than twelve centuries. It began in the Nara period, when the aristocracy gathered to admire the plum, and shifted during the Heian period toward the cherry, whose blooming the Emperor Saga made the occasion of formal feasts of poetry and music at the court in Kyoto. From those gatherings grew a whole aesthetic of the cherry blossom that has shaped Japanese art and feeling ever since.

At its centre lies the idea the scholars call mono no aware, the tender awareness of the passing of things. The cherry is beloved precisely because it does not last. It opens all at once in a great pale cloud and falls within a handful of days, and in that brief and brilliant career the beholder reads the whole shape of a life. The eighteenth-century scholar Motoori Norinaga held that the entire task of art was to give voice to this feeling. The warrior class took the blossom for their own emblem for the same reason, seeing in the petal that falls at the height of its beauty a mirror of a life meant to be brief and honourable. The falling petal is the doctrine made visible: loveliness and mortality bound in the same slow descent.

Where the three meet

Set these three together and a single quiet argument emerges. The moon dies to a thread and is reborn, month upon month, the oldest teacher of the truth that endings are only turnings. The blossom falls so that the tree may flower again. And the unicorn, alone among the beasts, is the deathless one, the creature glimpsed only by the pure and never truly taken, a figure of what does not pass at all.

In Blossoming Dream these meet without strain. The unicorn reclines in the very rain of falling petals, the undying amid the dying, and over both presides the moon that reconciles the two. It is a picture of rest inside the turning of things, of the eternal keeping company with the transient and finding it beautiful. Readers who follow such currents will recognise the temper of the Codex of the Outer Realms, whose whole concern is the contemplative reading of ancient symbols; the painting speaks the same language in colour that the Codex speaks in prose.

About the painting

Blossoming Dream is an original acrylic painting on canvas by Rob Medley, worked in a palette of deep violet, moonlit blue, and blossom pink. It is one of a body of original fantasy and visionary paintings offered through Kreative Forge, the independent studio of Rob Medley, and it may be seen in person at the Renaissance and medieval faires where the studio keeps its booth through the season.

The painting is available for purchase. Enquiries, prices, and a fuller gallery of original paintings are all a short journey away. Those who would keep a little of the moonlit grove upon their own wall are warmly invited to write.

Firefly Redux

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I channeled Leo Villarreal when I originally did this back in 2015. Over shows it received some damage, so I spent today putting it back together. It will be at my booth for the Great Lakes Medieval Faire. It needs a home. Here are some repair process pictures.

One of the frames came loose. As you can see from the next one, I painted both sides of the canvas, much like I did for “Artistic Triage.”

Back-side above, front below.

You can’t really see it here but I use blue, green, and purple to achieve the presence of all colors… or is it the absence?

Taken from above on my bed. The painting is 30×40 (I think). She’s big.

Here’s where Villarreal comes in. The painting lights up. It’s electric USB so there needs to be an outlet nearby.

It’s also 3D. Admittedly, modern art was a phase for me, I found out it wasn’t my jam, so there’s only 2-3 pieces in that category.

View from the bottom. The fireflies are hanging out over the grass.

Available for purchase.

Believe

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“Believe” arrives at the hour when the visible world loosens its grip and the older one beneath begins to glow. A wisteria, ancient and twice-twisted, holds the center of the canvas, its trunk rising from the dark margin of a still pond into a canopy heavy with bloom. Magenta and rose gather at the crown, while the long racemes descend in violet curtains toward the water, each pendant cluster trailing like a thought too patient to be spoken aloud.

Believe

The phenomenon that gives the piece its strange pulse is bioluminescence. Veins of cold blue light run the length of the trunk and gather in the roots, as though the tree had swallowed a portion of the moon and kept it burning within. That same light returns in the water at its feet, doubled and softened, so that the wisteria appears to stand upon its own reflected fire. Above, a slender crescent presides over a sky banked with luminous cloud, an old companion to anyone who has kept watch through the small hours.

Wisteria has long carried meanings that exceed its beauty. In the gardens of the East it stands for longevity and the endurance of devotion, its woody vines outliving the generations that first planted them. The Art Nouveau masters, Tiffany foremost among them, prized its cascading form for the way it dissolved the boundary between architecture and growth. Here the flower serves an older purpose still, marking the place where the seen and the unseen exchange their confidences, where all that hangs downward toward the dark is answered by all that rises upward toward the light.

The title asks little and offers much. Belief, in the sense the painting intends, is the quiet conviction that the dark is never merely the absence of light. The void was never empty. Something has always been waiting within the roots, within the water, within the patient descent of the blossoms, ready to shine for those who hold their gaze long enough to see it.

“Believe” is an original acrylic painting on canvas, eighteen by twenty-four inches. Sold.

Celestial Dream

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A winged thing rises from the meeting place of water and air, half dolphin and half something older than taxonomy permits. Its body carries the cool sheen of pearl and amethyst; trailing fins dissolve into ribbons that read at once as fin and as feather, while a banner of refracted color crosses the upper register and cumulus piles rose and silver against a sky that has not decided whether it is morning or the inside of a dream. Celestial Dream takes for its subject the simplest of impossible propositions, that a creature of the sea might be granted the freedom of the heavens, and asks the viewer to consider why such an image feels less like invention than like recollection.

The dream has its precedent in fact. The great swimmers of our own world were once walkers; the ancestors of whales and dolphins left the land near fifty million years ago and went down into the water, trading limbs for flukes and the open breath for the long patience of the dive. To grant one of them wings, then, is merely to reverse a second time the direction of an ancient migration, to imagine the sea sending an envoy upward as it once received one from the shore. Myth has always treated the boundary between the elements as a membrane rather than a wall, and the canvas honors that older intuition.

A whimsical painting of a purple whale swimming through a colorful sea with abstract clouds in the background.

Stranger still, the dolphin holds a genuine and documented place in the human search for company among the stars. In the autumn of 1961 ten scientists gathered, quietly and at some risk to their reputations, at the radio observatory at Green Bank in West Virginia, to ask in earnest whether anyone might be listening from beyond the solar system. Among them sat the young Carl Sagan and the astronomer Frank Drake, who scratched out during those days the famous equation that still bears his name and still frames every reckoning of how many speaking worlds the galaxy might hold. Present also was John C. Lilly, whose studies of dolphin communication so impressed the company that they styled themselves the Order of the Dolphin. The reasoning was elegant. A mind that had evolved in the sea, alien to us in nearly every particular and yet plainly intelligent, was the nearest rehearsal available for the far harder conversation that science hoped one day to hold with a mind from another star.

There is a poetry in the parallel that the founders of that search felt before they could prove it. A dolphin moves through a dark and crowded medium by casting sound into it and reading the echoes that return, assembling a picture of the world from the discipline of listening. The radio astronomer does very nearly the same, sweeping the silence across frequency after frequency in the hope that one narrow band will carry a voice. The bright arc that crosses Celestial Dream is itself a lesson in that same grammar, for a rainbow is only the slender visible portion of a far wider spectrum, and the cosmos speaks chiefly in colors our eyes were never built to perceive, in radio and infrared and the high registers of X-ray and gamma. The painting hangs its creature upon the one ribbon of that spectrum we are permitted to behold.

The deepest resonance, though, lies beneath ice rather than above cloud. The likeliest harbors for life beyond the Earth, by the present reckoning of planetary science, may be no sunlit worlds at all; they may be the dark interior seas of frozen moons. Jupiter’s moon Europa conceals beneath its cracked shell a global ocean thought to hold more water than all the seas of Earth combined, and Saturn’s small moon Enceladus flings into space, through fissures near its southern pole, plumes salted with organic compounds and the chemical makings of metabolism. If anything swims in those hidden waters, it does so beneath a roof of ice, under a sky it can never rise to meet. Celestial Dream may be read, by anyone so inclined, as the wish of such a creature made visible, the longing of the sealed ocean to know the open air.

Carl Sagan, who had sat among the Order of the Dolphin as a young man, would later describe the whole of space as a cosmic ocean and our first ventures into it as the cautious wading of a creature that has known only a single shore. We are ourselves the dreaming sea-thing of the canvas, bound to one blue world and gazing upward at a vastness we have only lately begun to swim. The same question moves beneath a good deal of the work gathered among my collected paintings. Moonreach sets a full moon within a serpentine world-tree under the old hermetic rule of as above, so below; the Mermaid Mashup asks why the forms of the sea and our own should be thought separate at all. The thread holds constant throughout, whether the dark overhead is empty, or whether it has merely been waiting.

Celestial Dream offers no argument and demands no creed. It sets a luminous improbability before the eye and lets the mind follow it where it will, toward the evolution of swimming things, toward the solemn first meeting of the scientists who hoped to overhear the cosmos, toward the buried oceans of distant moons and the patient question they keep. The void was never empty.

Acrylic on canvas, 18×24.

Moonreach

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Moonreach gathers the eye toward a swollen lunar orb suspended within a firmament of deepest indigo, its pocked silver face worked in glacial blues and bruised violets that seem to hold a cold interior fire. A solitary tree, leafless and serpentine, ascends along the left margin and curls its luminous branches about the moon as though to clasp or to summon it, an attitude recalling the ancient conception of the axis mundi, that world-tree whose crown brushes the celestial vault while its roots descend into the chthonic dark. The lunar sphere has long stood as emblem of the reflective and receptive faculty, governess of tides and of dreams, mistress of the threshold between waking sense and the deeper waters of the soul; here she presides over a slumbering wood of spectral conifers, their forms half-dissolved into the surrounding night. The composition answers to the old hermetic intuition that the visible heavens and the hidden interior mirror one another, that to reach toward the moon is to reach within. Rendered in acrylic upon canvas at eighteen by twenty-four inches, the work carries the saturated, atmospheric darkness of nocturnal romanticism while preserving the cool clarity of moonlit revelation.

A mystical landscape featuring a vibrant blue moon set against a dark sky, with abstract tree branches reaching towards it and hints of stylized evergreen trees below.
Moonreach

Those drawn to the thinking beneath this image may find its argument set out at length in a recent essay, String theory, quantum entanglement, and the geometry of nothing. The piece traces a strange convergence among modern physicists, that geometry is the residue of relation and that distance measures only how thoroughly two things fail to know one another. Moonreach renders the same intuition in pigment. The serpentine tree does not stand beside the moon in mannerly proximity; its luminous branches curl upward and clasp the sphere, closing whatever gulf the eye first supposed lay between them. The reaching is the proof. The dark between tree and moon carries the faint stippling of correlation, the void doing its patient work, the world-tree of older cosmologies pressing its crown against the celestial vault precisely where heaven and soul are held to mirror one another.

Crimson Noctiluca

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A vivid painting depicting a large red moon illuminating a dark forest path, surrounded by trees with twisted branches.
Crimson Noctiluca

Crimson Noctiluca emerged from an experiment with boundaries. For years, I’ve built my darks the way one builds a symphony, layering Payne’s gray with deep blues, purples, and forest greens until the shadows sang with hidden color. But this piece called for something different. Something absolute.

I reached for Musou Black, the blackest black commercially available, a paint that devours 98% of light that touches it. Full throttle. No safety net.

The result is a landscape that exists in contradiction: a crimson sun that seems to generate its own luminescence, suspended in a void so complete it challenges the eye’s ability to perceive depth. A solitary figure stands at the precipice with her animal companion, witness to something that feels both apocalyptic and intimate.

The Photography Paradox

Here’s what the camera cannot capture, the “highlights” you see in the photograph are not highlights at all. In person, those warm ochres, burnt siennas, and living corals pulse with an energy that 500+ megapixels of human vision can perceive, but my lens cannot. The Musou Black creates a depth that swallows the surrounding color in photographs, rendering them ghostly when they are, in reality, vibrant and warm. It’s the black hole of the color world. I probably will not be making prints of this painting.

A dark, atmospheric painting featuring a large, glowing orange planet partially obscured by abstract dark foliage and swirling colors.
What a frontal picture doesn’t capture.

I’ve tried every lighting configuration, every camera setting, every post-processing trick. Some art simply demands physical presence. This is one of those pieces. I apologize for the photograph, not the art.

Acrylic on canvas, 18″ x 24″, Available.

A Meditation on Black

This piece marks a departure, and likely a farewell. The absence of light (or is it the presence of everything absorbed?) feels antithetical to how I experience the world. I paint to illuminate, not to obliterate. Crimson Noctiluca stands as a singular exploration into the void, a testament to what happens when you push color to its absolute limit.

Some experiments teach you what you don’t want. Others teach you exactly what you needed to know.

Woman with a Dark Heart

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There exists in the trade a quiet expectation, rarely spoken yet universally understood, that a painter who finds a worthy subject will return to it some three to five times before its interest is exhausted. Monet gave us his cathedrals at Rouen, the same stone façade rendered through the shifting hours until the architecture dissolved into pure atmosphere. Thiebaud spent a long career arranging pastries upon their counters, a single glazed donut becoming a meditation on light, pigment, and the American appetite. The logic is sound. A familiar form permits the hand to wander, freed from the labor of invention, attending instead to the subtleties of touch and tone.

A surreal painting featuring a naked woman with red hair, seated at a table with a green cloth. She holds a hand up, surrounded by flowing tentacles. In the background, a window lets in light, and a painting of a woman with a pearl earring is visible on the wall. The scene includes various objects like candles and an artifact on the table.
Woman with a Dark Heart, Rob Medley

A difficulty presents itself, however, when the chosen subject possesses no form to begin with.
The shoggoth was H.P. Lovecraft’s answer to a question few thinkers care to pose: what shape does horror take when shape itself has become the enemy? In the frozen record of At the Mountains of Madness, these creatures appear as heaving masses of black, iridescent protoplasm, bred by the Elder Things as beasts of burden and stripped of any fixed anatomy. Eyes form upon the surface and sink again. Limbs rise, perform their labor, and are reabsorbed. The thing is a viscous congeries of bubbles that throws up whatever organ the moment demands, then forgets it ever held one. To render such a creature is to paint the refusal of permanence, a study in the impossibility of study.

So one returns to the problem of the series. Tea and Tentacles stood as the first of these shoggoth studies, painted before an audience at the Akron Zoo Renaissance Festival, where the creature wore an almost domestic charm. Woman with a Dark Heart is the second. A third waits in the wings, concept defined, awaiting the horror of being brought to life. Three studies of a thing that cannot hold its own outline for the span of a heartbeat, the proposition borders on the absurd, which is precisely why it merits the attempt.

The composition descends from Johannes Vermeer, who remains the first name in my private canon, with Bob Ross holding second place and Larry Elmore the third. An honorable mention belongs to Han van Meegeren, the gutsy Dutchman whose teachers and critics pronounced him a mere imitator, a hand without an idea of its own. He answered that verdict with the longest insult in the history of the trade. Laying his own name aside, he painted Vermeers so persuasive that the foremost connoisseurs of the age wept over them as lost masterpieces, and one such forgery he sold to Hermann Göring himself, taking the Reichsmarschall’s looted fortune and leaving the man a worthless canvas for his trouble. The war ended, and that sale earned him a charge of collaboration grave enough to cost a man his life. To save his neck he confessed the grander crime, that the prized “Vermeer” had come from his own brush, and he proved it by painting another under guard while the prosecutors looked on. Half the country toasted the rogue who had swindled a Nazi. The older Dutch, who had endured the occupation in earnest, hold a colder view, and count him a collaborator who grew fat while his neighbors went hungry. A scoundrel, perhaps, though a scoundrel with nerve, and nerve is the rarest pigment on any palette.

The particular ancestor here is the Woman Holding a Balance, painted around 1664 and now resident at the National Gallery in Washington. In that quiet interior a woman stands at a window, an empty scale poised between her fingers, while behind her hangs a painting of the Last Judgment. The reading offered by generations of scholars concerns the weighing of souls, the measure of a life set against eternity, temperance triumphant over the pearls and gold strewn across her table.

A woman in a blue cloak and white headscarf stands beside a table, holding scales with a serene expression, surrounded by luxurious objects and an ornate painting in a dimly lit room.
Woman Holding A Balance, Johannes Vermeer


That theme of the weighed soul reaches back far older than the Dutch Republic. The Egyptians knew it as the psychostasia, the ceremony described in the Book of the Dead, wherein the heart of the deceased was set upon the scale against the feather of Ma’at. A heart grown heavy with wrongdoing tipped the balance, and the devourer waited beneath the beam to consume whatever soul had failed. The title of this canvas takes its meaning there. A dark heart is a heavy heart, and a heavy heart does not balance.

Where Vermeer placed the Last Judgment, this version sets a Solomonic seal in red, the old grimoire geometry that claimed to bind spirits and command the unseen. The window survives, its leaded grid admitting the same disciplined light that the Delft master guarded so jealously. A smaller framed picture hangs within the larger scene, and the face caught in its gold border is the Girl with a Pearl Earring herself, lifted from the Mauritshuis, which I visited early in 2026, and pressed into service here, a figure in blue and a single luminous pearl quoted in homage to Vermeer’s own habit of setting paintings inside paintings. The balance remains. The heart, however, has gone to shadow, and the formless thing has come in through the dark.

A close-up portrait of a girl wearing a blue and yellow turban, with a pearl earring, set against a dark background.
Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer

This one resisted the hand for a long while, and the canvas carries the evidence of that struggle beneath its final coat. Modern imaging has taught us a great deal about Vermeer’s own changes of mind, for technical study has shown that he reworked his pictures more than once, adjusting the composition beneath the visible surface until the meaning satisfied him. Should anyone ever pass this newer canvas beneath a similar lamp, the scan would disclose a second figure, complete, standing nearer the left edge, and over it a moment of genuine doubt. The shoggoth now occupies that ground. A failed form lies buried under the one creature in all of literature that exists to devour form. The accident proved more honest than any plan.

Woman with a Dark Heart. Acrylic on canvas, 24 by 40 inches. $500. The second of the shoggoth studies.
The void was never empty. Find the path within.

Army of Dartness

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A vibrant jungle scene with colorful frogs among lush green foliage and tropical plants.

Beneath a canopy where daylight survives only as rumor, a congress of poison dart frogs takes the forest floor, each jewel-bright body burning against the green dark like an ember that refuses to go out. Crimson, cobalt, tangerine, and a green lit as though from within scatter across a tangle of palm fronds, fallen timber, and the patient gold of woodland mushrooms. These small amphibians of the family Dendrobatidae, native to the rainforests of Central and South America, wear their colors as warning rather than ornament, for the most formidable among them carry toxins once harvested by indigenous hunters to anoint the tips of their blowgun darts, the very custom that gave the family its lasting name. A small felicity of language attends the scene as well, since the proper collective term for a gathering of frogs happens to be an army, kin to the murder of crows and the parliament of owls. A host of these creatures becomes, quite literally, an army of dart frogs, and the title tips its hat to Sam Raimi’s 1992 cult film Army of Darkness, that cheerful marriage of horror and slapstick. Begun on my last day at the Akron Zoo and carried to its finish only this week, the work holds something of both the menagerie and the deep wild, a remembered humidity pressed into pigment. Acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24 inches. Available.

Tea and Tentacles

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The protagonist of this piece, if such a thing can be called a protagonist, is a shoggoth at his leisure. He has dressed for the occasion. A black silk topper sits upon the upper mass of him, a monocle is fixed to more than one of the more discerning eyes, and a pocket watch hangs by its chain from a tentacle that has just consulted the hour. It is teatime. The cup waits upon the cushion of the settee. Another tentacle clutches a slim volume, which any reader of Lovecraft should relate to at a glance: At the Mountains of Madness. The shoggoth, evidently, is reading about himself.

The thought animating the painting is what I would describe as post-industrial horror. The horror is not in the creature itself, which is rendered almost companionable. The horror lies in the smoothness with which the cosmic and the domestic have come to terms. The Outside has been invited in, has accepted a cup of tea, and has begun catching up on its correspondence. The wallpaper does not flinch. Nothing in the room registers an objection. That, more than any tentacle, is the unsettling part.

Painted during the Renaissance Festival weekend at the Akron Zoo, with all the cheerful clamor of the event going on around me. There is something fitting in that, I think. A shoggoth produced amid the noise of festival is a shoggoth properly placed.

Acrylic on Canvas, 18×24. Available.

A surreal painting depicting a creature with a mass of tentacles and multiple eyes, wearing a top hat, seated in a vintage chair against a patterned background.

Wisdom

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The owl looks back. That, in the end, is the whole of the painting. Another of a month-long trifecta that is coming to fruition this week.

I had set out to render the bird in something other than the customary brown and umber. Wisdom, in the older mythologies, keeps strange company. She walks the night with Athena, peers from the shoulder of Minerva, hunts among the Egyptian dead. None of that ground is quiet. None of it is soft. So I reached instead for cobalt and violet, for the colours one finds in the small hours when the eye begins to invent what the dark refuses to provide.

A vibrant painting of an owl's face, featuring large, hypnotic yellow eyes and a colorful abstract background in shades of blue and purple.

The oval canvas was a deliberate cheek. Portraiture in the old style insisted upon the oval for saints, mothers, and minor aristocrats. I rather liked the idea of an owl looking out from the frame once reserved for one’s great-aunt.

The eyes did most of the labour. I worked them in successive glazes of cadmium and ochre, then pressed the highlights in with the smallest brush I owned, the one I keep meaning to replace and never do. An owl’s eyes occupy almost a third of its skull. The painter who shortchanges them is painting something else entirely.

The beak, hooked and serious, settles the matter. There is no kindness in an owl. There is only attention. Wisdom, I suspect, looks much the same.

Acrylic on oval canvas. Available through Kreative Forge.

Midnight in the Sacred Grove

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Some symbols arrive on the canvas without much negotiation. The triquetra is one of them. I had the knot in mind. The trees had other ideas, and we met somewhere in the middle.

A Trinity Knot Grown from the Wood

The composition is straightforward. Three trees, three boughs, one sign. Their branches arch and cross to form the threefold mark that pre-Christian Europe carved on its standing stones, and that the early monks of Iona later set into the margins of their gospels. Beneath the boughs, the grove deepens into shadow. A pale sky holds behind the branches, somewhere between moonrise and the last hour of dusk. A pair of crows keep their watch on the central crossing, as crows tend to do.

I did not set out to paint a forest. Once the first arc began to feel like bark, the rest of the painting fell into agreement.

A mystical forest scene with intertwined trees and a large moon in the background, featuring deep blues and purples.

A Note on the Symbol

The triquetra, from the Latin tri-quetrus meaning “three-cornered,” is older than the histories that try to claim it. It appears on Norse runestones, in the Book of Kells, on the bracteates of Migration-era Germania, and on Indian temple carvings well before any of these borrowings became fashionable. Three interlocked vesicas. One unbroken line. Whatever a given century decided it meant (sun, moon, earth; maiden, mother, crone; body, mind, spirit), the geometry held. The symbol kept its silence and let the centuries do the talking.

For the Quiet Hour

This is a piece for a contemplative wall. Above an altar. A reading nook. A writing desk where the lamp goes on before the sun goes down. It rewards the long look. The longer one stays with it, the more the grove gives up. A moss line. A path one might already have walked.

The Particulars

Original acrylic on oval canvas. Heavily textured ground; the bark and the earth carry a physical depth that flat reproduction cannot quite catch. Signed verso.

Acquiring the Painting

Available through Kreative Forge. Originals tend to leave at shows, so an early inquiry is the surer road. Limited prints can be arranged should the original have already found its grove.

Reflections

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The moon gives light borrowed from the sun. Stand long enough beside still water on a clear night and one discovers the water gives that light back again, twice removed from its source and stranger for the journey. Reflection began with that small astonishment.

The work is acrylic on canvas, eighteen by twenty inches, executed in traditional brush and airbrush together. The lunar disc was laid in with the moon’s actual palette: cool greys of the highlands, iron-tinged browns of the maria, the faint warmth where regolith meets the observing eye. Over those true colors went a wash of reflected atmospheric light, the way she appears to anyone who has stood beneath her on a humid evening, haloed and softened by the air through which she is seen.

An artistic depiction of a large full moon illuminating a dark sky, with fluffy clouds and subtle stars, reflecting on a calm body of water surrounded by lush trees.

Below the treeline, the water carries her likeness. Look closely. Her image there is threefold.

The threefold moon is no recent invention. Hesiod gave Hecate three faces at the crossroads of the world. The Romans honored Diana Trivia where three paths met. Apuleius set into the mouth of Isis the great speech of self-naming, the silver crescent her chief crown. The triplicity of the lunar phase, waxing through full to waning, has been read by serious students of comparative religion as a single grammar spoken in many tongues.

Robert Graves drew these threads together in The White Goddess (1948), proposing that the threefold moon describes the great arc of feminine becoming: maiden in the waxing crescent, mother in the full disc, elder in the waning sliver. One need not concede the whole of his argument to feel the truth of the figure. The phases are observable. Their correspondence to the seasons of a life requires only that one has lived a little.

So the painting hides nothing. The single moon above is the body of the night sky. The three moons below are her phases gathered into one still water, and that water is the contemplative mind, which sees what the eye has seen and recognizes the pattern beneath the pattern.

There is a reason the mirror has always stood for the inner eye. What the world hands us in its turning, the mind hands back as image. Reflection in this older sense is the foundational act of contemplative practice. To stand at the edge of a dark lake and see the moon doubled is to be reminded that the world is twice given: once in fact, once in the silence behind the eye.

The water in the painting is calm enough to receive her, troubled enough to render her in motion. The triple reflection wavers a little. So does the soul that beholds her.

Reflection is offered to anyone who finds in such things a quiet companion to long thought. She asks nothing of the wall she hangs upon. The moon never has.

Acrylic on canvas, 18 × 20 inches. Original painting by Rob Medley. Available; inquiries welcome.