No Self, Portrait

FULL MOON
September 30, 2023

August 2020

The painter sits before the canvas, listening to the woman who grieves, who is silent, who is voiceless, thoughtless.  Wandering the barrenness of her life, sifting among the wreckage, seeking remnants, talismans of who she was.  And is no more.  A dissonant note streams from the belly of homesickness, a lament of the lost.  This woman wants to go home.  Yet she cannot.

            The air sizzles.  Who is she now, painter?  Griever?  She is all nerve endings, sensation, and fear.  She is stripped, razed to the ground.  She stands before the black canvas, praying that something, someone emerges from the dark matter of this woman’s soul.  

            The painter begins, lifting a tube, squeezes thick purple worms over the black canvas.  Followed by deep and light reds, yellows, oranges.  Wielding the pallet knife she lays fiery arcs across the black void.  She stands back.

            Snatching a rag she wipes away paint,  revealing a face, blank and black amidst the color.  A No-Self Portrait, she thinks.  She outlines the head, the face half black, half turquoise.  The left cheek bone white, the right black.  A mask of turquoise, black, white, two large eyes streaming tears.  Mute, staring.  Mouth open, as if to speak, or keen.  This is the woman who cannot find herself, she thinks, yet she cannot deny her power.  A woman with nothing to lose. 

            Regal and present, on fire with longing for home.  For her tribe.  For him.

Eerie, archetypal, singed. Looking out, looking at, looking on, looking through to the sizzling foundation of a home that no longer stands.  Her eyes a pleading, an accusation, look out at you, and you.  And you. 

Dare you Witness?