Herstory:  Hecate:  I am the one who lives at the beginning and at the end, who gives you wings when you step off the edge; acrylic on canvas, 24" x 36", painting series by Tammy Vitale

Yesterday’s dreamtime contribution to where ever it is I am going with this.

Wylde Women will be the line of  9 – 10" clay women who will belong to an as yet un-named community, within which each will have their own purpose and name (either an attribute such as joy or courage or peace, or an herb with its attributes).

Herstory will be a line of paintings based on mythology written from a woman’s perspective without the patriarchal male overlay.  Think Bridget as Celtic goddess as opposed to the tamed St Bridget of the Catholic Church.  Think Isis instead of Mary (likewise tamed and stepping on her snake power symbol).  Much of the story work on this has already been done by feminist writers of the 70s and 80s.  I plan to mine such works as Barbara Walker’s The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets,  Harvey and Baring’s The Divine Feminine:  Exploring the Feminine Face of God Around the World,   Eleanor Gadon’s The Once and Future goddess:  A Sweeping Visual Chronicle of the Sacred Female and Her Reemergence in the Cultural Mythology of Our Time, and Naomi Goldenberg’s Changing of the Gods:  Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions among others.

There’s yet another line which will be a combination of clay, cloth, beads.  Each of those will have an individual story which I expect to hear as I make them.  I’ve never made anything like this but saw something which sparked the idea while lunching at Padi’s this past week – a beautiful piece that I know I’ve been working toward in my own work but haven’t experimented with yet in the actual making.

Likewise for the tall pieces, which will also probably be individuals as opposed to a series, though one may lead to another as I get the technical process down through trial and error.

I expect the wall multi-media pieces to have spanish moss for hair as opposed to the green shreds I’ll be using on the Wylde Women.

Truthfully, they will all be some aspect of the Wylde Woman archetype (who is so lovingly portrayed in Pinkola-Estes’ Women Who Run With the Wolves).  And names may just take a different form for the multi-media pieces:  Wylde Wymyn for instance.

So I still need stories –  a community and a naming process – for the original pieces.  Think:  Cabbage Patch Kids with individual name and birth date….something like that. 

On another note, got three pieces of 4 juried into The River Gallery’s February show.  That’s a pleasant bit of news.  At that drop off – a good 40 minutes from home, met another artist from across the road from me (small world), and she invited me next Sunday to a local salon regularly held by a well-known local artist.  So I’m going to try that out too for networking purposes.

Forgot to remind everyone yesterday (in my own creative frenzy) that I am this month’s host for Create a Connection’s Creative Sundays.    My first post went up yesterday.  Click on over and check out my expanded definition of creative (paintings, poetry, a good pot of soup and your own special spa with candles and home-made scrub).

thought for the day: I am going to argue that it is not necessary for human beings to share the same myths, images and symbols.  Instead, it is more important that human beings share the process of symbol creation itself.  This is an age in which pluralism is a fact of life….One of the great ideals of the feminist cultural revolution is that all human beings be encouraged to find their own dignity and pursue their own truth.  The creation of a new set of stereotypes would be sad indeed.  Naomi Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods:  Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions

cost of the war in Iraq to date here.