goddess painting of the day: Amaterasu

With spring so temptingly near (yes, I know what the calendar says, but that has nothing to do with the schizophrenic weather we’ve been experiencing), here’s a goddess painting to lure the sun out.

This watercolor and gouache painting of Amaterasu was created for the anniversary reissue of The Book of Goddesses. It will also be featured in my upcoming Goddess Inspiration Oracle (which, if you haven’t downloaded the free Goddess Inspiration Oracle excerpt yet, I invite you to do so).

A benevolent solar goddess, Amaterasu is the supreme deity of Shintoism, a religion practiced primarily in Japan. Perhaps her most famous myth concerns the goddess’s anger with her brother, the storm god. To punish him, Amaterasu hid herself in a cave, thus plunging the world into darkness. Balance was restored when Amaterasu was lured out and entranced by her beautiful reflection in a strategically-placed mirror.

As you can probably tell, this is a small painting - it measures a scant 2.25 x 2.25″ square. I used my finest size 000 sable watercolor brushes to paint it. It was inspired by traditional Japanese prints of the goddess. If you’re interested, this painting of Amaterasu is available for purchase on my online gallery at kriswaldherr.com.

 

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Joanna Powell Colbert’s Gaian Tarot

Like Lisa Hunt, whose mythic art I featured last week here, Joanna Powell Colbert is also a tarot deck creator. Her magnum opus is the Gaian Tarot, whose progress I have been following for several years on her sensitively written online journal. This journal also details her life on a small island in the Pacific Northwest, which sounds soothingly idyllic to this overscheduled city dweller. She lives there in a dream house built of hay bales and art. Whenever I visit her blog, I gain a sense of catching my breath, if you know what I mean.

Joanna writes that “The Gaian Tarot celebrates the living Earth and those who seek to live in harmony with Her.” Accordingly, the art for the deck is filled with numerous reminders of the profound beauty of the natural world.

The cards are drawn in the painstakingly-detailed medium of colored pencil. It’s a technique that requires many, many hours of patient loving labor.

Right now, the major arcana of the Gaian Tarot have been finished and labor on the minor arcana is underway. When all is finished, Joanna intends to have the entire work published. In the meantime, a first edition of the Gaian Tarot major arcana was produced and quickly sold out. However, due to popular demand, Joanna has made a second edition available for purchase. The art is also available on archival-quality limited edition prints.

In these times of climate change and Katrina-style storms, the message behind The Gaian Tarot is more important than ever: Take care of Mama Earth, and she will take care of you.

If only more politicians in Washington could heed this wisdom!

All art in this post © Joanna Powell Colbert. All rights reserved.

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the most beautiful house in the world?

Much as I love creating books, my main artistic inspiration these days derives from architecture. Surprised? Well, it’s not just the abstract idea of architecture that does it for me (though I do think of books as structures requiring balance and harmony, just like a building). To be precise, it’s Italian villas that are making me swoon — especially if they have interiors profusely decorated with tromp l’oeil frescoes.

It all began during my last visit to Venice in 2000. While my love for Venice is well documented by my illustrated novel, The Lover’s Path, this time I expanded my explorations to beyond that city. A day trip to the Brenta River valley introduced me to the villas of Andrea Palladio. It also brought me face-to-face with what many consider the most beautiful house in the world.

The Villa Foscari, better known as La Malcontenta (more on that below) was built by Palladio in 1558. While La Malcontenta belies its nickname to be a happy model of architectural perfection, what took my breath away was the whole of the interior: the furniture, the terrazzo floors and, most of all, the frescoes, which careen with color and light and life.

What’s the story behind La Malcontenta? One story claims that the villa received this name because the owner’s wife was locked up in the house after she failed to live up to her marital duty. A variant of this tale blames the wife’s unhappiness upon the humid summer weather of the Brenta River, which brought her discomfort and disease — an Italian Renaissance version of Washington’s Foggy Bottom.

Is La Malcontenta the most beautiful house in the world? It is for me. On my bulletin board in my studio, I have several color postcards of it that I glance at periodically during my work day. A friend joked that these photos represent my “happy place” — a metaphorical place that I can visit to center myself, to remind myself that perfect beauty does exist.

Now that you know about my not-so-secret obsession, it makes sense that my Cupid and Psyche painted violin from last year was a homage to the Villa Malcontenta. As I painted it, I was attempting to capture in a very small way the all-encompassing beauty I felt in that architectural structure.

I mean, isn’t that what art’s about? An attempt to channel our experiences into something tangible?

photos of Villa Foscani © Courtauld Institute of Art. All rights reserved.

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goddess painting of the day: Venus redux

Though the world is still grey here, I’m encourage that spring has officially arrived on the calendar. And in honor of this happiest of seasons, here’s two paintings I created of the Roman goddess Venus.

Though most people equate Venus with love and sensuality, she was first honored as a deity who primarily concerned herself with vegetation and gardens. Thanks to the all-pervasive influence of Greek culture on the Roman world, Venus became affiliated with Aphrodite, the powerfully persuasive Greek goddess of love.

Nonetheless, remnants of Venus’ origins can be discerned in the writings of the poet Ovid. He wrote that Venus was worshiped at the Veneralia, a festival celebrated April first. For this holiday, Ovid implored women to “wash the statues of Venus all over, put their golden necklaces on again and give them roses and other flowers; and then, as the goddess commands, you must wash yourself under the green myrtle.” Roses are still associated with Venus to this day.

The first painting of Venus is a watercolor that I created for The Book of Goddesses. It also was reproduced in The Goddess Tarot and my novel The Lover’s Path. It doubled in The Lover’s Path as a portrait of Tullia, a courtesan who poses as the goddess of love in the book.

The second Venus is a small oil painting which was created for The Lover’s Path Tarot. It will also be featured in my upcoming Goddess Inspiration Oracle, to be published this fall.

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The Inspiring Art of Lisa Hunt

If you at all are involved with Tarot, then you’ve certainly come across the art of Lisa Hunt. Lisa is a tarot goddess, pure and simple. Starting with the bestselling Shapeshifter Tarot, she’s illustrated more decks than I can imagine doing even at my most ambitious.

Tarot decks are a lot of work. I sometimes joke that tarot artists are the marathon runners of the illustration world. I mean, a tarot deck requires 78 original paintings—compare that to the typical children’s picture book, which usually requires about 16 paintings. If creating a tarot deck is a marathon, then Lisa has painted the equivalent of a decathlon during her career.

Lisa’s latest deck is the 2006 COVR Interactive Sideline Award-winning Animals Divine Tarot, which she wrote and illustrated; I was asked to write the introduction, which I happily did. She has two new decks underway, one of which is the Fantastical Creatures Tarot. This will be published by US Games Systems later this year.

In addition to her tarot work, Lisa has written and illustrated books, including Celestial Goddesses. In between all of this, she also paints images for gaming cards. In other words, she’s amazingly prolific.

It astonishes me to realize that Lisa Hunt has been a close friend of mine for almost a decade. So I’m fortunate to know her work as well as her lovely self. We’re also working together on a book which, surprisingly, is not tarot-related, though it is mythic in theme. Books are often long-aborning, and this one is no different. I hope to have more information about our project later this year!

To learn more about the inspiring art of Lisa Hunt, visit www.lisahuntart.com. You can also purchase her books, tarot decks and special autographed prints of her work here.

All images in this post © Lisa Hunt. All rights reserved.

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