contemplative art

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.

Contentment

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The Story Behind Contentment Originally painted around 2017, the first iteration of Contentment featured a serene, introspective woman in a peaceful pose. However, as time passed, the idea of expanding the scene began to take shape. The addition of the jellyfish transformed the piece from a simple portrait into a surreal underwater moment—one where human … Read more