The above painting is from the high altar in our Lady Chapel in which Mass is said daily. As our cathedral is Anglo-Catholic, and the Catholic Church dedicates October to the Rosary, it seems fitting to write about Mary before the month ends.
But this is a ruse because, as an artist and spiritual person, I find God in the gaps between things as much as I find what I am looking for in my objects of study. When I begin to write or make art about something or someone, I sooner or later realize that eyes in the back of my soul are studying something else.
As I write about Mary, Mother of Jesus, my gaze flies to the Trinity—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—in which Jesus has his constant home. Here, by logic, I see Mary as the Mother of God. But logic is a clumsy tool for me, unlike a paintbrush I load with color. What I grasp as I write is the color that means Mary—blue. I want to show, however clearly, where blue meets God.
Cezanne is known as the the father of modern art. He is reported to have said, “Blue gives other color their vibration, so one must bring a certain amount of blue into a painting.” My painting teacher would say “Blue is the matrix of the universe,” thinking he was quoting Cezanne. (“Matrix” orginally meant “womb” and comes from the Latin word for mother.)
Through the appearance of blues that became available in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Prussian, ultramarine, and phthalocyanine blues respectively—we see a matrix of blue become increasingly apparent in art. Liberated from costly pigment ground from lapis lazuli—the likely sapphire of the Bible—painters spread blue paint and opened the heavens for us.
Mont Sainte-Victoire, Paul Cézanne, 1902-04
The painter Wassily Kandinsky wrote: “The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural... The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white.” A spiritual painter and writer, in writing about blue, did Kandinsky see Mary?
Jaune, Rouge, Bleu, by Wassily Kandinsky, 1925
At a recent Zoom meeting, the Dean sat in front of a tapestry of Jesus and the Sacred Heart as I stood in front of my semi-abstract watercolor of Jesus on the sea, which is my backdrop to the chaos of the pandemic and also to hope. I was struck by how the colors both in the Dean’s tapestry and in my painting are almost the same—as if I and the tapestry-maker held the same palette of colors and their meanings.
The tapestry’s Jesus is made from browns—earth tones—and is surrounded by blue sky comprised of the blues I mention above. The Dean’s Jesus has white angels within the blue. In his sermon on Sunday, Dean Harding spoke of Jesus’ sacred heart on fire for us. The white surrounding the heart shows its constant, intense heat.
Christ on the Sea, Brynna Carpenter-Nardone
In my painting, even as a color, Jesus has taken on earthly flesh to be surrounded by water as he was in the womb of his mother, blue Mary. He emerges to still the storm and point to glimpses of the color the Church loves to end his advent with—white—which might be moonlight or the Spirit moving on the water.
At this moment in time with injustice and unrest, sickness and death, we more easily recognize our fear of chaos than we see that we also fear our own advent and becoming. Can we for a moment, through the art of contemplation, deliver ourselves to be sown with Christ as a seed for the future? Are we able to remember our home in the matrix of the universe?
We are all meant to be mothers of God...for God is always needing to be born.
—Meister Eckhart