The painting 4g (Wisdom) explores a few narrative strands that end up converging.
Along with wrinkles, experience and wisdom tend to grow with age. In a sense, it is the real tree of life — had it not been applied to something more important: the biological term for having offsprings.
Trees have existed long before humans. Not only have their canopies provided us with shelter, they have also provided us with meaningful analogies ever since. Analogies that have made us make sense of great many things.
Trees are big in Celtic mythology. Take for instance Ogam, the Celtic oracle of the trees or lore and druid mysteries of tree magic. In our age, and far more useful, the concept of trees serve as structures for indexing knowledge such as mindmaps, decision- and family trees.
When all that is said about the narrative strands, there are profundities, like this one by Carl Jung, that cannot be ignored:
“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
It could inspire a whole cycle of paintings. This is one, at least.
You can find more paintings from the series Caligo here.
Title/Titel/Titel/Títolo #4G, Acrylic and oil on canvas/ Akryl und Öl auf Leinwand/Akryl og olie på lærred/acrílico e óleo sobre tela 100x100cm.