R24 Nuclear Creature

R24 Nuclear Creature
36 x 24" oil on panel

Here the checkerboard becomes three-dimensional, heaving up in irregular thrust faults, the upheaval of a threatening world. The order and pattern of life is broken up, but out of the disorder and threats (missiles, darts, dark birds, like omens) there arises a new creature.

22 June 1987
Completed the oil painting, R24 , after working on it all day and most of the evening. Most of my recent drawing s and watercolours have the same motif, an ambiguous creature rising up out of chaotic, fragmented surroundings. These are pictures that I may not like in the future, but they are essential products of my thought processes at the moment. It is as though my purpose were to take apart what I have been doing (origin) and examine every piece (fragmentation) and come up out of it with a new vision (eruption). All my creatures are pushing, reaching, climbing, striving. Out of confusion, one vision.

Eve was bent over her new picture, etching lines into the wet oil of the under-painting with a stylus.

“What is that?” Allan asked.

“I am trying to interpret my mental state,” she said without looking up. “I’m making a little being that is not a man or a woman, but an artistic spirit. A brave little artist,” she indicated a creature with the point of her stylus, “hissing up through the fissures and angles of a warped set of blocks, erupting in a mass of wings…they look like black fire, don’t you think?...sensing something out there, out beyond the painting. Defiant.”

I had to ask, Allan thought. Did she rehearse speeches like that?

Mary Weymark Goss (from the un published novel ‘Raven’)

R18 Nuclear Kitchen

R18 Nuclear Kitchen
10 x 14" designers opaque and watercolour
Personal collection

I worked on this on my lap in the living room, and kept adding things that I saw around the house. There is a mixer with a raven claw for a blade, a stove knob that looks like a raven’s eye, and a cigarette lighter with a beak and an eye.

R14 A Dream of Rose

R14 A Dream of Rose
9 x 13" designers opaque watercolour on paper
Private collection

An idea for my novel 'Raven'. One of the Nuclear Sequence, the first watercolour that was meant to be part of the series.

With a painfully quick inhalation he realized that it was Rose. Rose, covered with feathers, or some sort of cloak. Out of a dusky tattered hood her white face with heavy brows drawn down over deep eyes, stared. In a moment he knew she would lean over him with a blunt musical utterance, a throaty monosyllable. Incomprehensible.

-Mary Weymark Goss (from the unpublished novel 'Raven')

R7 Nuclear Tablecloth

R7 Nuclear Tablecloth
48 x 48" oil on panel
Corporate collection

The day I was etching in this large panel coated with red oil paint, it was announced over the radio that the nuclear power station at Chernobyl had exploded, and a cloud of fallout was spreading over Europe.

The image of a mushroom cloud, which of course has nothing to do with a reactor explosion, is symbolic of the word and idea of nuclear. The idea is that nuclear physics has a continuous influence over our lives, and the shadow of abuse of power and its sudden disruption of our quiet existence (the domestic checked tablecloth and the blue and white cup). A flurry of ravens (persistent ideas) is sent swirling away by the force of the explosion.

I was greatly affected by the notion that an event on the other side of the world could change our lives here. Although this is not an ‘anti-nuclear’ painting, it is meant to draw attention to the precarious stability of our lives.

R6 Rose in Kitchen

R6 Rose in Kitchen
24 x 36" oil on panel
Private Collection

The first painting in the series to employ the checkerboard motif that became part of the Nuclear series. Rose and I were fascinated with the light patterns on the kitchen floor, and she posed there for the drawing. She spent several days sitting in her leotard on the cold floor and feeling, as she put it, “a little strange about anyone walking in.” This is a good likeness, and Rose’s husband approved. The raven shape appears in her hair, and the raven himself is supposed to be hopping across the floor, just out of the picture (his shadow appears in the floor).

Although it took me days to do the checkerboard in the curtains, and I swore never to do it again, I went on to use the motif in several more paintings in the Nuclear sequence. As in the other Nuclear pictures, the red checks represent order and peaceful domesticity, the chaotic shadows in the floor reflecting the turmoil outside the window (the world outside).