Golden Flower

30x48 inches. Mixed media oil painting on canvas. SOLD

I developed an interest in Carl Jung’s mandala art and the images he drew in Liber Novus (1913-30), his personal journal filled with drawings and recollections of visions from the unconscious. Jung was asked by Richard Wilhelm to write commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower, a Chinese text combining Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian thoughts on inner alchemy meditation. In the commentary, Jung included a mandala drawing from Liber Novus, the first time he had publicly shared his interest in mandala art and tantrism. The book details a kind of meditation practice focused on the circulation, fixation,  and contemplation of light in the body, attuning to the heavenly consciousness of the heart and preserving the seed of life to balance between action and non action. By harnessing the rhythms of breathing and refining the movements of the material plane, one becomes more aligned with the primordial spirit. The Golden flower is the essence of the primordial spirit. There  are many medieval and ancient texts which suggest that cooking and preparing food is a form of alchemy (by which materials are chemically transmuted), a famous instance being Maria the Jewess’ (circa 1 AD) invention of the bain-marie (double boiler) apparatus. In this painting, two women wearing straw hats pour a substance, the elixir of life, into a river submerged with clouds.