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.
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.