Finding Softness
- Jul 18
- 2 min read
When I paint Mary Magdalene, I look for softness. I want her iconic face to be timeless, ageless and peacefully detached.
I want her iconography to subtly come through without great gestures. Light in the shape of a cross on her forehead. Tears of light down her cheeks. Her voice invisibly shining through her throat chackra. Red for her veil. Skin the color of the earth.
I want her to be present in the image and say with paint what is difficult to say in words. Beyond the stories and the mythology, and beyond the written words through which we seek to know her.
I want to find her through the act of painting. Sitting with a blank canvas and a few colors, I aim to bring forth an image that comes out of me, but also from somewhere else.
There is softness in silence, prayer and meditation. A softness that translates into the quiet transitions of color in a painting.
It’s not so easy to find it. And some materials are more holy than others. Naturally holy, naturally whole and beautiful.
This little painting started with a small canvas board and some acrylic paints. I usually paint the Dark Magdalene using matte acrylics and pearlescent inks. This transition began when I discovered pearlescent inks and combined them with tile painting gold outliners in 2010. At that time, I was creating poetry murals for a school in my old neighborhood. Later, during a dark period when I lost my home and studio, I began painting darker images of the Magdalene. These stood in contrast to the luminous original oil paintings.
I continue the two series and love both. The Dark Magdalene is the mysterious being that inhabits a cave, and into whose darkness her light shines. The Luminous Magdalene, painted in pure oil colors, is the being of light who has trascended the world we inhabit and has reached the light of the Divine, Endless, Infinite, Love.
But sometimes that dark Magdalene calls for the softness and purity that helps her most peaceful images appear. And only oil paint can do that.
Areas of acrylic remain because these were just right for me. But her face needed that softness of love. And the dark cave needed the deep black that absorbs and cleans all.
These are the conversations I have with Mary Magdalene. Hard to translate, but with a certain truth to them that becomes a lesson for me.
Our work is never finished, not until a peaceful softness makes it a caress that softly transmits the peace of inner joy.
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