Inner Voice Art

Have those beehives that work

in the night stopped? And the water-

wheel of thought, is it

going around now, cups

empty, carrying only shadows?

No, my soul is not asleep.

It is awake, wide awake.

It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches,

its eyes wide open

far-off things, listens

at the shores of the great silence.

— By Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz, also known as Antonio Machado (1875-1935), Spanish poet. © 1983 Robert Bly (trans)

If you were a person of consequence in the 1920's, 1930's or 1940's, or wanted to choose a suitable portrait painter for a commission of an important member of society, then it is very likely that the artist you would place at the top of your wish list is Oswald Birley .

Capable of creating not only a fine likeness but possessing an ability to bring thoughtfulness and empathy to his work, Birley was regarded as the ‘go-to’ portrait painter of the day, a painter who would deliver a work that would capture the essence of the subject and stand the test of time.

A frequent subject of his paintings was his wife, Rhoda. Widely regarded as a beauty, she married Birley at the age of 20 when he was 41. Here is a particularly beautiful portrait made by Birley soon after their marriage in 1921. Entitled The Green Masque, it depicts Rhoda in Venetian carnival attire, her alabaster face glowing against a dark background, her eyelashes demurely lowered.

Also of note:

- Birley was the first British artist to have a studio built for him in Palm Beach in 1926

- In 1931 he painted Mohandas Karamchand ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi, commissioned by the Chief Minister of Gujarat, Sir Prabhashankar Pattani

- In 1941 he lost his right eye while supervising a demonstration: an experimental anti-tank which misfired

― Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Her father, a Lancashire textile millionaire, had her presented at court as a debutante; she was expelled from two convent schools before that and never went back to the life he had planned.

She reached Mexico in 1942 and stayed until her death in 2011, one of the last survivors of the original movement, and the hooded figures and hybrid animals in her paintings come out of alchemy and the Celtic folklore of her childhood as much as from anything she found there.

Miracle view of a hummingbird nest on a peach.

Cocktail lounge attire by Elizabeth Hawes, 1940's.

And when you have an intense contact of love with nature

or another human being,

like a spark,

then you understand that there is no time

and that everything is eternal.

The beloved has appeared, in one of her fierce or more wrathful forms, carrying the power to undo the familiar arrangement of who we have taken ourselves to be.

This is part of what makes healing and awakening so disagreeable at times. We imagine they will make us feel better, safer, more certain, perhaps even more whole. And sometimes they do.

But initiation has another movement. It contradicts the persona. It disturbs the world it has so carefully arranged. It brings us into contact with a life that may bear little resemblance to the one we were certain we were going to live.

Something unexpected enters the room and pulls the rug out from underneath us.

There is a mercurial intelligence in the psyche that does not seem particularly interested in preserving who we think we are. It disturbs what has become fixed, opens what has become closed, and returns movement to places that have crystallized around certainty.

Perhaps this is one of the deeper purposes of regulation: not to become increasingly undisturbable, but to develop enough ground that we can allow ourselves to be genuinely moved.

To be touched by beauty. Undone by love. Rearranged by grief. Astonished by what we cannot explain.

Not every disturbance is a sign that we have lost our way. Sometimes the path itself comes to disturb us.

- Matt Licata

“Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places.”

- Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Secret Garden

“Courtship is to sit next to someone and discover what they love.”

~ Martín Prechtel